


Eye of the Storm

by flanahan



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Multi, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tech Noir, basically all the aliens are now androids, everyone's a little older and a little harder, think like... blade runner for aesthetics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2019-09-22 10:31:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17058143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flanahan/pseuds/flanahan
Summary: One day after the three-year anniversary of Shiro’s death and, in all the ways that matter, Keith’s as well, Keith falls asleep in the bowels of a decaying city, and he dreams of the desert. He dreams of familiar things: the cracked red rocks, and the fragrant heat, and a gaping void. He dreams of unfamiliar things, too: a desperate urgency that thrums through him like fire. But no matter how fast he flies, he never gets closer. He never finds what he’s searching for. That’s familiar, too. He thinks maybe he hears a voice. Just an echo in the howling storm, just another ghost in a desert full of skeletons.I’m coming, Keith screams, but it’s swept away by the wind.He flies and flies. He chases. He thinks of Shiro. He knows this. He knows this.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy howdy, this is my first fic literally ever, I have no idea what I'm doing, but boy do I love sheith. Please let me know if any warnings needs to be added to the tags, and apologies if I missed anything sensitive. Updates roughly every 2 weeks.

On the three-year anniversary of Takashi Shirogane’s death and the official end to the Tech War, a fight breaks out in the Building 2 cafeteria of the Mojave Desert Solar Power Station. It’s a hot day for November—it’s been an unseasonably dry month, which means the cooling systems are pushed past their limits and fail daily, requiring crew to go outside and prowl through the panels in search of the mirror that’s malfunctioning so it can be reset and the system can be turned back on.

Keith doesn’t mind the extra work. After Mars, he figures there isn’t much work that he would mind. He isn’t bothered by the wind or sun, nor does he particularly enjoy the downtime between his other duties. The pockets of quiet are precious rest for the crew but nothing more than a screaming void for Keith, and especially today, the one day of the year when the mood from dawn to dusk is hellishly somber and Keith’s brain feels like the inside of an overheated microwave, he’s more than happy to strap on his goggles and face mask, zip his coveralls up. Slip out into the gritty daylight and wander through the shimmering sea of solar panels: do something with his hands.

The station manager has planned a moment of silence for 12:30, just after lunch, which is why Keith’s heart leaps in relief when the cooling system failure alarm blares to life at 12:05. The rest of the room groans in unison. Keith finds himself smiling. This close to LA’s radiation smear zone, the crew is a healthy mix of humans and androids, and their proximity to Arizona has also ensured that there’s a smattering of Garrison vets as well: the atmosphere is tense at the best of times; it’s downright fraught today. But apparently not even the ghost of war can grind away the camaraderie that has developed against the incessant cooling system alarms.

Keith rises from his table, scoops his gear up. “I’ve got it,” he says, and then presses through the swinging cafeteria doors.

“Kogane!”

Keith turns around and fights down a sigh. Dawson, his supervisor, is hurrying out after him. He waits for her to catch up. Standing in the hallway, they can hear the desert winds howling outside.

“Got the moment of silence soon,” she says. When Keith doesn’t say anything, she crosses her arms, settles her weight a bit more evenly. “The repairs can wait.”

“I don’t mind,” Keith says, hoping his neutral tone comes off as obtuse, rather than openly disobedient.

From Dawson’s expression, he figures he misses the mark. “Listen, Kogane,” she says. “I’ve given you your space these past few months. Seems you had a rough go of it in the war. Thought it was the least I could do.”

Keith’s back stiffens. “I don’t need your charity.”

He despises how transparent he is to other Garrison vets. There aren’t many of them around, but despite his every effort to remain invisible—to be just another beaten-down contract worker in a sea of beaten-down contract workers—he can always pick out the vets and they can always pick him out. It’s hard enough living with the fact that the Garrison took away everything he loved; it’s absolutely unbearable knowing that it has also left some things behind. Dust and blood ground into the creases of his skin. Even worse is the fear that the other piece of him is just as obvious, just as evident.

“It wasn’t charity. It was the right fucking thing to do. And if you have any self-decency, you’ll do the right thing too. You’ll go back into that cafeteria and pay your fucking respects.”

Keith grits his teeth, doesn’t realize his whole body’s gone tense until his muscles begin to tremble. “And if I don’t?”

“I write you up for insubordination.” Dawson smiles grimly. “Wouldn’t want something like that on your record, would you? Not with winter hiring starting up the day after next.”

So Keith hides in the far corner of the cafeteria, as close to the doors as Dawson will allow, and listens with one ear to the pre-recorded Empire message, words about remembrance and honor, self-reflection and healing. It’s all a load of bullshit, and if it wasn’t for the undercurrent of cold steel in Empress Honerva’s voice, it would have veered dangerously close to pandering. As it is, everyone bears through it in stony silence—listening to this is just another a necessary evil in a world that is, as of late, full of them.

When the recording finishes, the building manager shuts off the audio system with a small remote and then clears his throat. He’s a mousy man, with a collared shirt tucked neatly into khaki pants. He’s a remnant from before the war, when these sorts of grunt jobs hadn’t been overrun by wayward vets, when opposing factions hadn’t been forced to work together in close quarters, when fucking solar power building managers hadn’t been expected to keep the peace. He nudges his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“Well,” he says, and then clears his throat. “Let’s all take a moment of silence to think about, uh, the war, and, y’know. All the—just, all the terrible things that were done. On both sides,” he adds, and then immediately looks terrified for doing so. He clears his throat and bows his head.

Silence stretches through the room like a rubber band, every second adding a new and surprisingly visceral layer of agony to what had already been pretty fucking unbearable. Keith clamps down on the inside of his cheek and tastes blood almost instantly. The metal tang, the slick feel of it in his mouth and against his teeth, the ghost of war hovering in every crevice of the room—it nearly tugs him down into a well full to the brim with violent, burning memories.

The building manager snaps him out of it with a clap of his hands. “Alright,” he says, his voice callously chipper. “Unless anybody has anything else to add, I think that should—”

“It’s all bullshit,” grates out Rett, who’s seated at a nearby table. He’s older, generally soft-spoken, but right now he looks like he’d take on every single person in the room if he had to. 

“Sorry?” calls the manager. “I, uh didn’t catch—”

“What about _our_ kids?”

The temperature in the room plummets to sub-zero. Keith sinks lower into his jacket, until most of his face is hidden behind the collar.

“What about all the Empire kids who died, who were slaughtered by that Shirogane fuck? And all the Empire ever talks about is _his_ _kid!_ ”

“Rett,” someone mutters, but he lurches to his feet and looks round at everyone. His eyes skim over Keith, but for that moment Keith feels himself lock up under the anguish he sees there, even as his lungs begin to alight, latent rage waking from its half slumber, pumping sluggishly through his veins like molten rock. They meet somewhere in the middle of his gut, the shame and the anger, and keep him frozen.

“It isn’t fair,” Rett bellows. He’s red in the face. “The _Garrison_ —” he spits the word out like a bad watermelon seed “—gave as good as it got, but every goddamn year we have to listen to the _Empire_ trip over its feet trying to make them _feel good_ , as if we were the bad guys, as if we were the ones who started any of it—”

“You think we _like_ listening to that bullshit recording every year?” a nearby woman barks. “You think it makes us feel good, having those Galra bastards rub their victory in our fucking faces—”

Suddenly everybody wants to say something, at volume. People surge up from their seats, begin shoving their neighbors around, and the building manager does nothing but watch nervously, eyes darting to all the exits and the swarm of workers seething before him.

An elbow prods Keith. He turns to see Leni, a droid who Keith’s worked with on-and-off the past three years. There’s a hard edge to his grin that immediately sends Keith’s hackles rising.

“About time someone said something,” he mutters.

Keith can’t do anything but stare at Leni’s leathery face, fixate on the scar underneath one of his sun-marred eyes, anything to keep the seams from bursting loose, anything to keep his fists stuffed deep in his pockets. Out of his periphery, he notices several workers now standing nose-to-nose, slinging insults back and forth, poking fingers into chests. Rett has left his table and is now shouting in front of the manager, and the security guards are starting to close in on the crowd, hands drifting to the batons on their belts.

“—won’t say it,” Leni’s saying, “but if you ask me, that Shirogane kid deserved it.”

Keith blinks once, slowly. “What?”

“He deserved it,” Leni says again, a little louder and a little slower, as if Keith didn’t hear the first time, as if this is an easy fact, an obvious fact, like gravity or oxidation, and repeating it is a simple thing. Keith thinks he maybe hears the blood rush from his head into his limbs, spreading out through his chest like black diesel. Leni leans in closer, speaks so softly it’s almost intimate. “Maybe this makes me a sick fuck, but I rewatch that video every once in a while,” he says. “You know, the one from the news, with him all strung up, and that fucking _beast_ that took him out—”

Keith springs forward. He drags Leni to the floor, has him trapped between his thighs in seconds, feels the breath sawing through his throat, the tug of pain in his leg. Leni’s staring up at Keith with his mouth half-open in an aborted scream or plea, or maybe he’s still trying to finish that sentence, the one about Shiro—

Keith growls and cranks his fist back, but before he can crunch some bones, a hand snags his wrist. He considers, for one mechanical moment, throwing the newcomer over his shoulder, using their weight to send them sprawling, but the grip turns python-tight. He turns to find Dawson standing over him. Her face is pale—anger or fear, he can’t tell, he’s found that they bleed together easily enough. Her eyes slide sideways, towards the rest of the cafeteria, and Keith realizes it has, in the fleeting seconds his vision had gone laser-sharp, erupted into chaos.

He doesn’t know if he started it, if he had broken the last stone keeping the flood at bay, or if perhaps everyone collectively lost their shit at the same time—it’s funny, how in- sync crews like these get, after working several seasons together—but it’s clear that, because of the mayhem, his own violence has not yet been noticed. He hasn’t yet done anything irreparable, he hasn’t yet caused documentable damage.

He wants to hit Leni until his face caves in. He wants to _kill_ Leni. But a mark on his record could mean the difference between surviving the winter and starving to death, and he has a promise to keep.

With a frustrated growl, he wrenches his arm free and swings it down onto the floor right beside Leni’s head. The sound is like a gunshot. The impact sends electric sparks up his arm. Leni jerks beneath him, face still twisted up in anticipation of a blow that never came. Keith looks down at his hand, white-knuckled, and then watches as it blooms open, fingers spread wide, to splay against the grimy linoleum.

He screws his eyes shut as a wave of sickness shudders through his body. Beneath him, Leni wriggles fruitlessly for a moment before kicking Keith. Keith slides off, hears Leni spit vitriol at him, but the words wash over like the receding tide. Nothing fucking new, whatever it is.

“Kogane.” Fingers brush against his shoulder.

Keith jerks away, heaves back onto his feet. Dawson watches him warily, hand still outstretched. He shoulders past her and then weaves through the violence that has permeated the room like an airborne disease.

The cafeteria doors slam behind him with finality, and the hallway outside is silent, save for the raging winds. He stalks down it, towards the airlock, doesn’t notice he’s limping till halfway, and then he realizes there’s hot pain shooting up his thigh and into his hip. He doesn’t slow. He latches onto the pain, tries to let it ground him. He digs a finger into the scar just above his knee. More pain flares, dull and hot, and with each pulse of his heart, with each aching throb through his leg, he feels himself coming back down, settling once more into his body.

He punches the airlock. It opens with a hiss. He enters it and stands there as the doors close behind him and the system prepares to let him outside. He tugs his goggles down, yanks up his face guard.

The doors open. Blinding sunlight spills in. He heads out into the desert, into the labyrinth of mirror panels, tries to find comfort in the desolate silence, tries to appreciate the sun on his skin, tries to lose himself in the ritual of restarting the cooling system. But he can’t get the taste of copper out of his mouth, can’t get the picture of steel-gray eyes out of his head, can’t stop thinking about the last time he had seen them: on the other side of a static-laden television screen—just a cluster of gunmetal pixels, a recording of an event that had taken place miles and miles away, months and months before, far too late for Keith to do anything, for all the fucking good it would have done.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thank you to those reading this. Also this will get explicit later in the story ha so I have added that rating.

The Mojave Desert Solar Power Station keeps electricity running for the entire state of California, as well as some small chunks in Arizona and Nevada. It’s the largest station in the country, and the most productive station in the world: five circular plots of rotating mirrors, each ten miles in diameter and rumors of more being added sometime next year.

Keith works at the power station during the sunny months, when more hands are needed to keep the systems running smoothly: brush grit out of jammed cogs, reconnect wires that get knocked loose in high winds, keep the operating temperatures somewhat reasonable. It’s hard work, but it keeps Keith busy. Sometimes it’s enough that his mind untethers and his hands take over. He’s always had a knack for hardware; the Garrison pilots used to joke he had a silver thumb.

_(“What the hell does that mean?” he asked Shiro the first time it was said to him, while the rest of the squad hooted and hollered at his blank face._

_“Having a green thumb means you’re good at gardening,” Shiro explained, and his voice was even but his eyes were twinkling. Keith wanted to smack him and kiss him at the same time, so instead of doing either of those things, he clenched his fists and felt his face grow hot. “So silver thumb—”_

_“Right. Got it,” Keith said. He proffered a finger to the room. “What color’s this one, assholes?”)_

The panels follow the sun’s trajectory, hooked up to some model that’s probably decades old by this point. Keith has a niggling feeling that it’s not so accurate anymore—remembers astronomy lessons at the Garrison about the planets stretching away, the moon pulling from the earth, the sun getting older—which might account some for the steady decline in annual energy output, though most of that is likely due to the fact that there’s now more ozone in the atmosphere and more clouds in the sky than there were a hundred years ago, back when the earth was a blemished scab of radioactive energy, when Keith would’ve gotten cancer just for standing downwind of L.A. for more than twenty seconds, and they’re blocking more sunlight than they used to.

The light energy is turned into heat energy, which is pushed through a number of treatments before reaching the control board in Building 1, which then directs it to the rest of the state: underground wires shooting out like a highway network, zig-zagging beneath the dust and tumbleweed, most of it going towards the cities and not enough of it going to the rest, but from what Keith knows of Earth’s history, that’s nothing new.

The summer crew is shuttled out late next afternoon, after everyone’s checked for radiation levels and their chips are reconfigured to allow them passage into the city. A grim pallor hangs over the proceedings, which are usually bubbling with excitement. Nobody died yesterday, but there were some fairly serious injuries—concussions, broken limbs, cracked ribs—which are as good as death warrants for laborers. There isn’t much room in the Galran order for those who can’t pull their weight.

Keith hunches into a window seat and isn’t paid any mind for the three hours it takes to reach Santa Maria. Garrison vets might be able to sniff him out without a problem, but on record he’s listed as a civilian and he’s cultivated a dull sort of surliness that, for the most part, keeps others from dredging up much curiosity for him.

His head and body ache. He doesn’t sleep well in general, but it’s been especially hard these past few weeks, the dread of yesterday’s speech and associated memories playing havoc with his mind. The only thing that kept him sane was work, and so he had thrown himself into it with reckless fervor. Now everything burns, like there’s sand stuck in his muscles.

They’re off the main campus in a matter of minutes, but it takes the better part of an hour to clear the official property line. In the far distance Keith can see glinting sunlight as it reflects off Grid B, the station’s northernmost plot, and it stays in his sightlines for a long time.

The desert, on the other hand, falls quickly away. They pass first across the Tehachapi Mountain Range, then into a flat basin that had been farmland before the bombs fell. It’s nearly impossible to tell now; whatever buildings and fences had once stood have long since collapsed, and the monoculture crops have been overrun by native vegetation. But as the train flies through the quiet fields, Keith catches brief glimpses of straight paths that run clear through the property, rows that have yet to be filled by time.

Passing through open terrain like this reminds Keith of a life long past, of riding his hovercraft for endless stretches whenever his troubles became too large to do anything but run away from. He allows himself a few precious moments to hold onto the feeling when it arrives, to recall a time when his garbage brain was something that could be left behind if he just rode fast enough, _hard_ _enough_ , and then lets it flutter away. He’s always scared of holding on too tight, of leaving grimy fingerprints all over and then one day taking the memory out only to realize he’s tainted it permanently.

Train rides are the closest Keith will ever get to flying again. The realization is so pathetically tragic he’s a little embarrassed for thinking it.

The train exits the Santa Ynez Mountains near sundown. In the lowlands that cup the coast sits the city of Santa Maria, eating up the earth like a tsunami of neon and metal scrap. Keith doesn’t think he will ever get used to how breathtakingly large it is. People began flocking to it after L.A. and San Francisco got blown to nuclear hell, transforming what had once been a relatively small city into a swollen metropolis in a matter of decades, and even though the land is recovering, the population continues to grow.

They pass through the city’s reactive barrier with nothing more than a soft blip from some sensor, and maybe a collective anticipatory grimace from those aboard. It’s a deceptively peaceful transition; if anybody aboard owed the government money, or didn’t have the proper clearance, or had been pegged as a potential dissident, the barrier would have triggered a series of violent electrical pulses through their brain, leaving them catatonic until the authorities arrived to drag them away for questioning—or, if left untreated, helpless to suffer a slow and painful death.

Keith’s seen it happen a few times. Today, the train car remains quiet. Small blessings. It doesn’t mean the barrier hasn’t done any damage; just that none of its victims are criminals. There’s no sense in worrying about that just yet, though, so he keeps his gaze trained on the window and watches through half-lidded eyes as the light outside transforms immediately from dusky purple to a filtered, sickly yellow.

Galran soldiers—more than usual, an unkillable part of Keith notes—stand at attention all along the outermost colonnades, guns gripped in loose fingers. Their heads follow the train’s progress. Keith tries to still his heart at the sensation of being observed so openly, so blandly, but it nevertheless plucks a sick chord deep down inside of him.

The train shudders to a stop on the platform. Keith’s leg, stiff from sitting still for so long, twinges as he rises and steps out into the aisle. A series of hisses and clicks start up all along the length of the train. It’ll be a few minutes before the airlocks get popped open.

He hears, “Hey man, we’re here. Jado. _Jado_. Oh—” A long pause. “Shit.”

Keith looks back to see a woman frozen in the process of leaning over a seat to shake someone awake. A Balmeran droid sits slumped against the window. It almost looks like they’re sleeping, save for the fact that their chest isn’t moving and their eyes, usually lit a soft yellow, are completely dead.

The woman opens her mouth, closes it, and then straightens up. When the doors open, everybody shuffles forward. Keith sees two more deactivated Balmerans on his way off the train, and then watches one young Balmeran woman who didn’t get deactivated stumble in a daze to the nearest station wall and slide down it, face hidden in her hands.

Keith clenches his teeth and grips his duffel a little tighter, but there’s nothing to do except keep walking.

The Mojave Desert Solar Power Station is the largest power station in the country, and the most productive station in the world. It can generate up to 100,000 megawatts of power at peak performance: a baffling sum. There are thousands of solar stations across the globe, so even though annual sunlight exposure might be decreasing, it’s a negligible thing. There are wind farms in the oceans, dams and mills in any rivers that survived the wars, all of them Galra-owned. The cumulative production rate of all of this combined is obscene.

The short of it is that the Galra have plenty of power—more than Keith thinks they know what to do with—and yet they are never satisfied. They corral and shove and _take_. They grind their citizens down until there is no soul left, only a husk that keeps working because the alternative is death, and on top of this is the fact that they are systematically exterminating all non-Galra droids, working through every model one-by-one and draining their energy, until none will remain but the humans, and perhaps by then the Galra will have figured out a way to siphon the life force out of them as well.

Keith wedges himself into the back corner of one of the station elevators, the only way off the train platform to the street below. Once the car is full, the doors close to seal them in, and Keith’s skin starts crawling immediately. For someone who spent as much time as he did crammed in a cockpit the size of a tuna can, Keith should be better about tight quarters.

But the image of the Balmeran curled in on herself so tightly, as though that was the only thing keeping her from crumbling into a million discrete pieces, it had picked at something old and brittle in his chest. And there’s an ocean of difference between the calm of solitude with nothing but whirring machinery all around and the crushing sensation of bodies on every side of him, wriggling and groaning and—

The sidewalks of downtown Santa Maria are clogged with early evening foot traffic, and Keith is a frayed wire. Cars and taxis sit bumper-to-bumper, the exhaust from their engines rising in a noxious cloud. Along both sides of the streets are skyscrapers that stretch so high their tops get lost in the hazy stratosphere. It’s a maze of blinking neon and cold concrete and rust that smells like fear.

By the time he’s a block away from the Municipal Center, everyone around him is a worker on their way to winter registration. It’s no longer a matter of fighting the flow of traffic and rather a matter of staying upright amidst the crush of bodies.

Keith swallows. People press in on him from all sides. He tries to force down the rising panic, but his next breath catches in his chest because suddenly it’s not just the recycled city air accosting him, it’s blood and sweat and vomit, and cutting through these consequences of captivity is Shiro’s unchanging scent, something that is quantitatively neither good nor bad, just _him_ , and it’s been so long since Keith has remembered how he smelled—

He moves through the rest of the evening mechanically: climbing up the steps on the main concourse, shuffling forward in a line that has no beginning or end, standing before a panel of faceless droids before receiving a small metal data card with his winter assignment details, the words “C.S. ANTIOCH” imprinted along the edge (he schools his expression upon receipt, but his gut swoops in desperate, hungry relief).

They scan his chip. It’s an unpleasant ten seconds of a hand on his neck and cold metal pressing up against the base of his skull, and then the chip reader bleats a tri-tone chord. The admin’s hands slide off of Keith. When they both look down, they see that the light on the scanner is green. Even so, a guard comes by and takes him down to the basement (another long elevator ride, during which Keith tries and fails to make eye contact with any of the other workers, who seem just as confused as him but unwilling to acknowledge it in front of their Galra chaperones), which is just a dank tangle of hallways with a lot of doors.

Keith is placed in a room with a desk and is left there for the better part of an hour. When the door finally clicks open, Keith straightens in his chair and watches a lean-faced Galran take the seat across from him.

A holographic screen pops up between them. Keith’s own face glares back at him from a blown-up image of his citizen card. The agent reads off some notes on an electronic pad, and then looks up to give Keith a tight, tired smile, as though the two of them are both unwilling participants in this. Keith crosses his arms over his chest.

“Mr. Kogane. My name is Haxus. I’ve had a chance to look through your file and I’m going to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

“Ask away,” Keith says.

Haxus leans back in his chair. “What color is my shirt?”

“White.”

“In what year were you born?”

“2204.”

A soft beep emanates from the pad: baseline diagnostics captured.

“Young,” Haxus remarks lightly. “Too young to enlist. So you didn’t fight.”

“Says it right there in my file.”

The smile tightens. “Humor me.”

“I didn’t fight,” Keith says flatly. Haxus’ eyes, pure Galra gold, flit briefly to his pad to check for aberrations in physiology. When he finds none, his lips purse. He points with his stylus to Keith’s wobbling citizen card, and specifically to one line.

 

MAKE: HUMAN

 

“Right,” Keith says.

“It has a stamp of validation, but there’s no record of getting tested in your file. Why is that?”

Keith snorts. “Do I look like a fuckin’ droid?”

“I know these questions seem overly obtuse,” Haxus says, “but it’s just protocol. The sooner you answer them, the sooner you’ll be on your way. Now, do you know why there isn’t any record of biological testing in your file?”

“I got tested as a kid. It was during the war. I guess the report didn’t get logged correctly.”

“Father Trevor Kogane.” Haxus pauses. “Recently deceased. Radiation poisoning.”

Keith doesn’t react, but the program tracking his biometrics lets out a small bleep.

“My condolences,” Haxus says. “Human. Is this correct?”

“He died of _radiation poisoning_.”

“Answer the question, please, Mr. Kogane.”

“Yes,” Keith grits out. “He was human. _Obviously_.”

“Your mother.”

“I never met her.”

“Do you know why she’s unregistered?”

“Sounds like she died before it became compulsory,” Keith says, which is another way of saying  _before you rounded up everyone who wasn’t Galra and implanted tracking devices into the backs of their heads._  

“Not even a name,” Haxus murmurs.

“Okay, _now_ what are you getting at?” Keith snaps.

Haxus’ eyebrows shoot up. The picture of innocence. “I’m just reading what's here in front of me, Mr. Kogane. Why on earth would you think I'm ‘getting at’ anything?”

Keith snaps his mouth shut, tries desperately to remain calm. He knows these pointed questions are just a tactic,  _knows_  they’re meant to rattle him up. It doesn’t change the fact that Haxus is brushing frighteningly close to some very carefully buried secrets.

“Was I brought down here because of my mother?” Keith asks. “Did you find her? Is she in trouble?”

“You’ve had issues in the past with your chip.”

Keith nods. When Haxus remains staring at him expectantly, he says, “Yes.”

Haxus shuts off the holograph. There’s a vacuum of sound now that the display’s low humming has been killed. “Describe them to me.”

A bead of sweat drips down Keith’s spine.

“When I get checked in, the system sometimes glitches and I get pinged as an unidentified object. It reads fine if I just wait a few minutes and try again.” When Haxus continues watching him, Keith goes on. “Is that why I got pulled down? Did the chip actually not read correctly? The light on the scanner was green.”

“Do you have loved ones in this city, Mr. Kogane?” Haxus asks. “Friends, partners?”

“I keep to myself,” Keith says.

“You have no emergency contacts, no next-of-kin. Not even a will.”

Keith refuses to panic. He refuses, because it’s completely irrational. If the Empire had really, truly suspected he was a hybrid—if it had any reason to believe a droid and human had successfully conceived—he’d already be strapped to a dissection table, with fifteen Galran scientists elbow-deep in his guts. Not sitting here, in this dank basement, being bullied by a weasel-faced border control officer.

“Extensive psychological studies have been conducted on human behavior patterns,” Haxus says. “We have found strong correlations between emotional isolation and extremist tendencies.”

“I don’t understand what I’m doing down here,” Keith says.

“It’s actually a very common phenomenon,” Haxus continues steadily, “individuals losing touch with the rest of the world, the greater community. Convincing themselves that the remedy to their misery is revolution.”

Keith blinks, and then works back through his evening: the elevator full of flummoxed workers, the slow-moving registration line. “You’re questioning everybody,” he says, and then has to bite the inside of his cheek when he goes even further back and remembers there had been an excessive amount of guards along the reactive barrier. “Something’s got you guys nervous. Something big.”

Haxus doesn’t react, doesn’t so much as quirk an eyebrow, which is an answer in of itself. “Do you know what happens to those who spurn Galra order?” he asks.

Keith does. He doesn’t say so.

“We send them to the labor camps on Mars. Do you know what those are like?”

Again, Keith doesn’t answer.

“Of course you don’t.” A sneer curls Haxus’ lips, and Keith catches a glimpse of canines a little too long, a little too sharp. “You wouldn’t last two days on Mars. You would snap like a twig.”

“Would I.”

“You believe yourself unique. Irreplaceable.  _Special_. I can promise you, you are not. I know you, Mr. Kogane, because I have interrogated hundreds of people exactly like you just tonight. You are all the same.”

“Are we,” Keith manages.

“Allow me to extrapolate. You grew up shoveling shit in some backwater hick town, the sort of place that does nothing more than  _take up space_ , and when your lowlife father skipped out to avoid the draft, you joined the work force. Not because you wanted to, but because the alternative was dying in the mud like an animal. And now you think you’re  _a man_ , simply because you’ve finally got some calluses on your hands.”

A sheen of red is spreading over Keith’s vision. He is gripping the edges of his chair so tightly he feels his joints creaking.

Like a shark to blood, Haxus senses his anger and doubles down. “You don’t know anything,” he snarls. “Not of hardship, not of sacrifice, not of fulfilling any purpose beyond your own small-minded imaginings.”

Keith’s hand cramps into a sudden fist. The metal beneath his fingers bends. Haxus thankfully doesn’t notice. Keith takes a breath and then says, “Am I being arrested?” 

Haxus regards him for a long, unimpressed moment. “You may believe your solitude protects you, but it is the opposite.”

“Am I being arrested?” he repeats.

“The Empire is a vast, intricate system whose very nature compels its subjects to fall in line.”

Keith takes the bait, because it seems to be the only way out of this room. “And those who don’t?”

The gold in Haxus’ eyes flares. “They are culled.” He gestures to the door, and Keith barely manages to keep from flinching. “Have a good night, Mr. Kogane.”

Keith leaves the building coated in a faint sheen of sweat, clutching his duffel like a shield. He plants himself at the nearest bar he can find, which ends up being in an underground nightclub with a cover charge and music so bass-heavy the bottles and glasses are all magnetized so they don’t go bouncing off of their various surfaces. He drinks until he isn’t in immediate danger of committing what would likely fall under the category of “terrorist activities”, and then drinks some more, until the edges of his thoughts have gone blurry and standing without swaying requires mental effort.

He emerges from the club with the likelihood of his engaging in violent activity significantly reduced, and it takes him nearly ten minutes to realize he’s walking in the completely wrong direction from where he’s supposed to be going. When he doubles back, he makes sure to give the Municipal Center a wide berth.

He winds his way to his winter housing, a government-funded apartment complex blocked out for contract workers that is in both application and aesthetic very similar to the Garrison barracks where he spent so much of his youth. It’s a long walk. By the time he gets there, the streets are nearly completely empty.

His room consists of a bed and a dresser, and a small port window that looks out over the street. It’s well past midnight by this point, but it might as well be noon with the amount of light pouring in. A billboard across the way flashes erratically. The point of the advertisement is lost entirely on Keith in the blur of garish colors and spinning shapes.

He collapses on the bed face-first. His bag is a comforting weight against his shoulder, almost like a body, and before he can fall too far along that train of thought, he’s asleep.

 

* * *

 

When Keith dreams, it’s of the desert—not the rusted train lines or the buzzing power stations, but of red and purple sunrises that stain the baked clay. In his dreams, the smell of scrub is familiar, sweet and subtle. In his dreams, he grips the hovercraft’s handles and feels the wind in his palms. Air rushes past him in hot bursts. It engulfs his mind, floods his ears, kills all thought. He knows this. He _remembers_ this.

Most dreams, he’s running. Running is in his bones and blood. It was the first and last lesson his father ever taught him.

Some dreams, when he’s lucky, he just flies. There’s nothing behind except a familiar weight pressed against his back, and nothing ahead but the bleeding sky.

Other dreams, though, he chases after something he knows he’ll never catch up to. Tendrils of what was, whispers of what could have been. Always out of reach. These are the nights that hurt the most, the ones he feels alive in the most brutal kind of way.

One day after the three-year anniversary of Shiro’s death and, in all the ways that matter, Keith’s as well, Keith falls asleep in the bowels of a decaying city, and he dreams of the desert. He dreams of familiar things: the cracked red rocks, and the fragrant heat, and a gaping void. He dreams of unfamiliar things, too: a desperate urgency that thrums through him like fire. But no matter how fast he flies, he never gets closer. He never finds what he’s searching for. That’s familiar, too. He thinks maybe he hears a voice. Just an echo in the howling storm, just another ghost in a desert full of skeletons.

 _I’m coming_ , Keith screams, but it’s swept away by the wind.

He flies and flies. He chases. He thinks of Shiro. He knows this. He knows this.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit y'all this chapter...... I spent one entire day on one single paragraph and then shat the rest out in a fevered haze. All errors - factual, grammatical - are mine own.

Santa Maria lights up while Keith is walking to the harbor. The change is precluded by a faint but all-encompassing hum, and then the particle barrier overhead, which is usually completely invisible, sort of— _shimmers_ , like a snake compressing and extending and then compressing again, sunlit scales rippling with the movement, the coiling.

Keith got bit, once, by a snake. It had been a Mojave rattlesnake, one of the most lethal in the world. And in the panicked days that followed, a panic made almost nonsensical by the utter banality of it—a _snake bite,_ out of all the crises to have in the middle of an unauthorized mission deep in Galra territory—Keith had found himself, for some reason, more surprised he’d even noticed the snake hiding in the scrub than the fact that he didn’t suffer anything worse than a low-grade fever.

_(“Jesus,” Shiro said, breathless with laughter and leftover fear. His chest rose and fell sharply, the bright white of his tee poking through the hole Keith had ripped through his camo jacket. “That was—really close, holy shit.”_

_“Your jacket,” Keith said, like that was the important thing here, like Shiro hadn’t just been moments,_ inches _away from—but he couldn’t get his brain to latch onto anything meaningful. The image of Shiro being bitten played on loop in his head, so horrifically pristine and clear that he was somewhat surprised to look down and find the rattlesnake dead between them, its skull pinned to the ground by his dagger._

_Shiro patted his chest a few times before his fingers found the ragged edges of the rip. His gaze drifted up and to the side, and then his face grew deathly pale._

_Keith frowned. “What?”_

_Shiro looked moments away from passing out. It was probably just the shock of almost getting bit by a fatally venomous snake without any hope for treatment (unless you counted a three-day trek through hostile desert as one, which Keith didn’t) but maybe he hadn’t been quick enough, maybe the snake—_

_“Keith,” Shiro said, low and urgent, and then he was scrambling into Keith’s space, pulling Keith’s hand down from where he had been tugging on his hair, cropped painfully short for the mission. Keith felt the tremors of lingering adrenaline in Shiro’s grip, same as his, but then he saw what had snagged Shiro’s attention so thoroughly and all the sensation in his body shuttered away and collapsed down to two points: two perfect puncture marks in the meat of his thumb._

_He dragged his eyes up to Shiro’s face, to slate-gray irises blown wide with terror, and tried to stay calm, tried to think of something productive, something helpful, Jesus, something that wasn’t,_ how many more kisses do we have before I die, _or,_ how the fuck will he get back to base without me, _tried to say something to wipe the terrible expression off Shiro’s face, but found himself incapable of doing any of it, found himself instead tipping his face into the crook of Shiro’s neck and closing his eyes, and shaking.)_

The particle barrier shimmers, then the entire city is filled up with a steady yellow light, like a huge switch just got flipped. Those who live in Santa Maria year-round call it “sunrise”. It’s nothing like a sunrise. It isn’t anything more than the barrier’s interlocking components shifting to refract and then redirect enough ambient light inside to replicate, half-heartedly at best, true sunlight.

Keith ducks into a 24-hour bodega and buys two small bottles of vodka—payment for later that night. It takes effort to keep his breakfast down as he weaves through the endless shelves of alcohol, his raging hangover not going anywhere anytime soon, but he’s nothing if not dogged. By the time he’s out of the city proper and drifting into the Santa Maria North Harbor, the nausea’s more or less passed.

He’s expecting the harbor’s usual morning bustle. Instead, he’s met with a tense quiet that only increases as he progresses further and then, at the docks, realizes the reason for the nervous energy: hordes of Galra soldiers have descended upon the harbor like a plague. They poke their heads in cargo plane hulls, rip open sealed boxes on their way to transport, stop random workers for questioning.

Their tones are harsh, weapons loaded, and the message is clear: everyone is guilty until proven otherwise. It reminds him an awful lot of Haxus’ pointed questions and thin-lipped anger. As Keith walks, he keeps his head firmly down. Interrogation is one thing; tearing apart the North Harbor like this is another entirely.

Keith can’t fathom what’s got the Galra so worried they’re willing to show their hand like this—they’re not usually the sort to show weakness, and publicly acknowledging their concern over an unknown threat absolutely counts—but then kills the ruminations before they go any farther.

Not his problem. Not anymore.

It’s nearly a mile-long walk down the dock to the Antioch. Keith’s trousers are soaked through with icy saltwater by the time he stomps up the ramp and into the receiving bay. He hands off his data card to some bored-looking security guard and then goes through a detector that is supposed to ping anomalous materials: unregistered tech, dangerous weapons, illicit alcohol.

Keith, bearing all three, steps through.

The first check of the season is always something of a crapshoot; there’s always a chance the Empire has updated its security systems while he was gone—but today, just like every single day before, nothing happens except a small delay in the system’s readout, and the subsequent flood of relief that passes through him is just as quickly subsumed by a noxious mix of disappointment and shame and self-loathing.

What does he care if he’s caught? If he’s killed? He _doesn’t_. He doesn’t care, but he also can’t just _roll over_ , because Shiro—

Keith made a promise. An implicit one, but a promise all the same. It’s the single thread keeping him tethered to the world, and it’s a frayed one at that: a wordless promise to a man long dead, a man who probably wouldn’t even recognize—let alone still _love_ —the ugly, hollowed-out thing that Keith has become.

“Kogane,” the security guard says in greeting, and then hands Keith his data card back. “You’re working Zone 2 today.”

Keith grunts his acknowledgement and heads further into the ship, where the sounds of the ocean are swallowed up by the engine’s rumbling, the yellow barrier light replaced by the faded white of buzzing bulbs.

The Galra parts of Keith keep him safe from things like ID chip scans, security checks, and snakebites. He would have been dead a hundred times over by now if it wasn’t for the inorganic currents tangled up alongside his human veins. He used to be grateful for this resiliency.

Now, all he has is resentment. Because the Galra parts of Keith do not keep him safe from those things worse than death, the things that break a person from the inside.

The Galra guards that share Keith’s elevator on his way up, their faces hard as stone; the Galra soldiers that root through workers’ lockers while Keith changes into his coveralls, their actions unyielding as an avalanche; the Galra workers that Keith passes on his way to Zone 2, their voices steady as plate tectonics—they all have circuitry that Keith doesn’t, programming that lets them grow cold, lets them combat the black void that is the future, the futility of their empty days, the unrelenting heat of grief—and Keith wishes: if he can’t die, if he’s really that hard to kill, then at least let him stop hurting so goddamn much.

 

* * *

 

The winter hires spend a dull two hours in safety orientation, and then another two in procedural orientation, and all the while Keith’s mind is on the alcohol in his pockets (hiding it in his locker was not an option today) and what awaits later that night. They break for a 15-minute lunch that Keith swallows down mechanically, and then they’re sent off to start on the real work.

Before Keith even clears the cafeteria, he’s pulled aside by the Zone 2 maintenance manager—a smarmy droid named Amzi—and presented with something of a problem.

“A partner.” His headache, which hadn’t been by any means _great_ up until this point, ramps up and gallops straight into full-blown migraine territory. “I don’t want a partner.”

“I don’t care,” Amzi says before slapping a small digital pad into Keith’s chest. “We need the new hires trained.”

Keith looks down at the pad. At his touch, it lets out a cheery bleep. His name pops up across the top of the screen, and below it a list of the duties Keith has been assigned to teach. His stomach clenches. It’s going to take weeks to get through them all, and there’s absolutely no way he’ll be able to slip away early each day.

He casts a glance at his assigned trainee, a big guy with puppy dog eyes and an expression currently twisted up into an apologetic grimace. “I haven’t done half these things in years,” he says.

“You’ll figure it out.” Amzi claps Keith on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him, and then strolls off.

Keith scrambles for anything, any excuse that will keep him from being stuck with a hanger-on for the next several weeks. His mind is agonizingly empty. “But. I’m not. I don’t—”

“Kogane.” Amzi doesn’t even turn around. “You don’t have a single goddamn say in the matter. So get going, or I’m docking both your pays for the day.” And then he rounds the bend, out of sight.

“Jeez,” the new guy mutters to Keith. “Somebody’s got their thermal resistors in a twist, am I right?”

Keith gives him a flat look before stalking towards the elevators.

The guy stumbles in his haste to keep pace and, once at the elevator, nearly bowls an exiting flock of engineers over, but he doesn’t attempt any further conversation, and so their long descent into the guts of the ship is blessedly quiet. It allows Keith some time to try and figure out a way he can still finish early _and_ lose the guy before dinner, every day, without arousing suspicion.

By the time they step off into the belly of the Antioch, he’s nowhere closer to a solution.

This deep down, the ship’s engines drone in Keith’s ears and chest like a living thing. The sensation teeters dangerously close to familiar, sets his teeth on edge, but these massive cargo vessels heave and haw like asthmatic whales, nothing like the heady snarl of military-grade fighter jets, and it’s different enough to keep his head straight. In a few days, it’ll be nothing more than background noise.

“Big ship,” the guy remarks. He looks around the exposed innards like he’s never seen anything like it before, and Keith thinks maybe he hasn’t—he’s got a warm, open face, and while there is certainly a edge to it, it’s the sort of edge that comes from hardships overcome, not ones currently being suffered.

“This is your first time on rotation,” he says.

“That obvious, huh?” comes the easy reply, and then: “But don’t worry, my dad’s—uh, he had a repair shop, so I’ve done a bunch of mechanical stuff. Not that it in any way compare to _this_ , but you know.” He sweeps his hand around the space and shrugs. “Translatable skills. Probably. Hopefully.”

Keith hums doubtfully. They start walking.

Down here, the overhead lights are busted, and there are puddles from condensation that are eating away the floor’s metal sheeting. They groan and shift under foot as the two of them shuffle along. It’s strange, moving through the broken-down hallways, as if they’re exploring an old relic rather than a functioning craft. The entire section they’re walking will need to be replaced before the ship can do any heavy-duty transport.

They’re fixing up water filtration systems today, which Keith hasn’t ever really thought of as difficult or complicated until he’s standing in front of the first system in the first room and realizing that, to somebody whose experience probably doesn’t extend much further than _car engines_ , the whole thing is actually both very difficult and highly complicated.

Keith’s never had to learn this sort of stuff, he’d never been _taught_ it; it’s always simply come to him, natural as breathing, and so it dawns on him slowly and terribly that he has absolutely no way of verbalizing any of it.

He tries anyway because the alternative is not getting paid and then probably losing his job, and he does an absolutely piss-poor job of it. He stumbles over words and skips steps and only realizes he’s forgotten the names of things once he’s already pointing at them and his mouth is hanging open, and at one point he tries to backtrack but then just ends up even more lost than before.

Keith starts to panic but then realizes that maybe this is his ticket out, maybe he’ll be deemed so hopelessly incompetent he won’t have to do any more training. But when he looks to the other guy—whose name is Hunk, not that Keith asked—his eyebrows are pulled down in concentration rather than confusion, and he’s bobbing his head up and down like he’s actually _following_ Keith’s babble.

Keith trails off, halfway through a sentence, unnerved at how earnestly this guy is pretending to understand, not sure if he should be angry or impressed. Hunk waits a few seconds, but Keith’s completely lost the plot. And in the ensuing silence, something appalling happens: Keith blushes. 

Then, something even worse happens: Hunk says, “Okay, cool, thanks man” and _starts closing off spigots,_ and Keith is too busy processing his body’s strange behavior to do anything but watch wide-eyed.

It becomes apparent very quickly, however, that Hunk knows his shit. Like, _really_ knows his shit, enough so that he’s soon doing it unsupervised, working in tandem with Keith, and the pair of them move through the rooms with scary efficiency. Keith realizes with a jolt that they’ll have the day’s work done earlier than Keith could’ve managed on his own, and so now all he has to do is figure out a way to shake Hunk.

Once again, a solution presents itself, with no effort on Keith’s part.

Hunk, as it turns out, is a basket of contradictions: he carries out an entire debate with himself over ion drive and subatomic engines but in the same breath describes the Antioch’s antiquated water system as “super interesting”; he catches a weak spot of piping by sound alone but can’t figure out the pad when Keith asks him to check something on it; he knows without being told where all the emergency airlocks are but then winds up so lost that Keith finds him fifteen minutes later wandering around the loading hangar, which is in Zone 4, nearly a mile away.

Keith learns three things about Hunk that afternoon: he talks— _a lot_ —when he’s nervous (he monologues nonstop the entire day, and Keith is too morbidly fascinated to stop it), he’s been trained really well (it was either that or somehow Hunk was also a droid-human hybrid, but in addition to that being impossible, his engineering knowledge is too encyclopedic, too precise to be innate) and he’s worked on an airship before (someone with aerospace experience doing repairs on a sea barge is like Emperor Zarkon taking out the trash at that bodega Keith stopped at).

So, Keith has blackmail. He’s not sure what exactly the pieces add up to, but it’s enough for a vague shape to form, and it’s nothing good. It sends a shiver of recognition down Keith’s spine.

They finish early. Keith spends the entire elevator ride trying to figure out how to use this knowledge as leverage without showing his own hand, without getting himself tangled up in Hunk’s past, or involved in Hunk’s present any more than he already has. He tries not to think too hard about the city-wide search, the quiet Galran panic, Hunk’s arrival and his nerves and the paint-splatter scarring on his knuckles, the sort you gets from staunching a plasma leak in a fighter jet engine’s magnetic chamber with your bare hands—

It’s not his problem. Not anymore. Not ever again.

And then, for the third time that day, Hunk takes the issue out of Keith’s hands.

_(“Good things come in threes,” Shiro intoned in a singsong voice, his shitty grin audible, and Keith tried shoving him off but Shiro had him trapped tight between his thighs, no wiggle room on the narrow Garrison mattress, and so all he could do was wait while Shiro gave him a third hickey, this one at the soft juncture of arm and shoulder._

_Shiro pulled back to survey his work, his cheeks flushed and his lips swollen—an obscene sight that left Keith a little boneless. Then his face went all twisty, the way it did right before he said something he thought was sexy but usually was just stupid._

_“You know what else can come in threes,” he purred, and Keith had to throw an arm up over his face to hide his smile._

_“I ain’t a good thing,” he said, words muffled by his elbow._

_“No,” Shiro agreed happily, “you’re the best thing,” and then his lips were back on Keith and everything went soft and warm, except for the three small bruises Shiro had drawn out, each one bright and sharp as a star.)_

The elevator ride is tense. Hunk stares at Keith the entire time with a constipated look on his face, and Keith begins to worry that maybe his scrutiny hasn’t been as subtle as he thought. But then, out of nowhere, Hunk blurts out, “Can I take the afternoon?”

Keith blinks.

“To myself?” Hunk further clarifies, and then looks like he’s in physical pain for having asked.

Keith opens his mouth and then has to close it, because he had almost blurted, _what the hell are you doing on this ship._ And then he has to take another moment, because the second thing out of his mouth had almost been, _Christ I could kiss you right now._

What he says instead is: “Yes,” and then over Hunk’s sigh of relief, “Don’t tell anybody.”

Hunk nods vigorously. “Yeah, yeah, for sure. Thanks, man. I, uh—I just have some friends who—”

“ _Don’t tell anybody_ ,” Keith repeats.

Hunk’s eyes widen. He presses his fingers into his lips. “Right,” he whispers. “Sorry.”

Keith punches the button for the next floor, and a moment later the elevator doors slide open. Keith gets out. Hunk remains, because Keith is making him dump the old fluorescent bulbs in the Level 15a supply closet.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Keith says.

“See you, thanks again!” Hunk tries to say, but it gets cut off by the door closing.

As Keith creeps along the Antioch’s length, bottles of vodka heavy weights in his pockets, he does his best to fight down the creeping sense that it may have been a mistake, being this reckless, especially when the entire city is bleeding Galra soldiers.

He’s not usually so nervous about getting caught. Then again, he’s never so actively brought someone else into the danger that is breaking protocol during hours. There is a life other than his own now at stake, and the stakes are high.

It’s a sobering realization, and grim, and terrible, but it doesn’t keep Keith from continuing his careful journey towards the auxiliary security offices. He’s got a deal to keep. He isn’t going to let some vague sense of guilt keep him from it. And if that makes him a bad person, well. Nothing fucking new.

 

* * *

 

Keith finds Zone 4 Surveillance Room 6 right where he left it six months ago, and he only hesitates a moment before rapping softly on its door. From inside he hears the squeaking of a chair and then scuffing boots, and then the door eases open.

Keith’s standing stiffly, braced for a stranger—god forbid, a _rule-abiding_  stranger—but it’s Erock and his familiar face, wrinkled and marked with thick red bands across his cheeks.

At the sight of Keith, Erock’s hard expression doesn’t so much as waver. After an entire afternoon with Hunk, who at one point told Keith without an ounce of sarcasm or ulterior motive that his eyes were “hella pretty” and has he ever considered eyeliner, Keith’s more comforted by the gruff reception than he’d like to admit.

Erock backs up, and Keith slips inside. As Erock closes and locks the door, Keith takes the opportunity to breathe in the familiar scent of overheated circuit boards and staticky television screens, to re-equilibrate himself to the sight of two chairs planted before a vast and blinking control panel.

Erock’s rough voice pulls him back. “You’re here earlier than usual.” 

Keith turns away from the console and stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Work got done quicker than usual,” he says.

“Not gonna get us caught, are you?”

Instead of responding, Keith pulls a bottle of vodka out. Erock’s expression grows keen. When Keith takes out the second, Erock says, “ _shit_ ,” with more feeling than Keith thinks he’s ever heard from the droid.

Keith fights down a smile. “Calm down, old man. It’s just booze.”

Erock yanks the bottles out of Keith’s hands, then cracks the top off of one. “ _Just booze_. If you knew the week I’ve had—” He tips his head back and takes three long pulls, and Keith’s stomach does a few somersaults.

“That bad?”

Erock plops back down in his chair. “Whole city’s in a panic. Nobody’s saying who or what for, but they’ve been keeping a particularly close eye on imports and exports, which—” He swivels in his seat and gestures to the grid of screens overhead, all of them surveillance feeds from the loading hangar in Zone 4. Keith wonders with some chagrin if Erock had watched the whole thing go down: Hunk stumbling around like an idiot, Keith scrambling to find him, their relieved but slightly pissy reunion. “So, yeah, bad’s one word for it. Shit, I don’t think I’ve stepped off this ship in _days_.”

He then points to the chair beside him, an invitation that Keith brushes off as casually as he can manage. As Erock settles at his station, Keith lowers himself onto the floor with a groan and leans back against the wall. The engine’s nothing more than a fat purr this far up, but it’s still nice to feel once more. He stretches his legs out with another groan, lets his hands flop between them.

“Jesus, kid, you sound like me,” Erock says. The unopened bottle gets tucked safely away in a drawer. The other stays in his grip. Keith sees on one of the screens a timer counting down, currently at 14:03:22. Droids like Erock don’t need much sleep. As a result, their shifts are hellishly long.

He pulls his eyes away. “Unlike you,” he says, “I did actual work today.”

Erock snorts into the bottle. He pushes the flap of his hat away from his face and then leans back in his chair to take a sip, this one slow and appreciative.

Beside Erock, lights flicker happily on the screens and the monitors hum a steady rhythm, seemingly in tune with the old guard’s contentment—another quiet night for the C.S. Antioch. Keith tips his head back, lets his muscles relax. He takes a breath.

He tries to keep his tone light. “You still hooked into the fighting station?”

“Shit, right.” A squeal of metal as Erock forces open a drawer. “Almost forgot.”

Keith watches him pulls out an old radio, old enough that parts of it are being held together with several layers of duct tape. “I don’t risk life and limb just for your company.”

Erock chuckles. “Not sure if this garbage is any better of a reason.” He presses a button and the machine whirs to life. “But I ain’t complaining.”

Tuning becomes a process that incorporates copious dial fiddling, muttered curses, and then a series of increasingly forceful smacks to the side of the radio. Keith can only bear it for so long before he’s back on his feet and nudging Erock’s hands out of the way. After only a few moments, it catches on the right station, and the sounds of gladiator fighting fill the room. Keith’s gut swoops.

He ignores Erock’s raised eyebrows as he retreats back against the wall. This time, he closes his eyes, lets the familiar wave of announcers shouting over both audience and contestants wash over him.

“—coming back from a bad injury a few weeks ago, but he seems in better form than ever tonight,” barks the commentator.

“He absolutely does,” says her partner. “Just watch him out there, Jessie, he’s got absolutely no reserve, seemingly no concern for his own well-being, so as long as he’s the one standing when that final bell rings—”

“ _Fierce_ is the word I’m thinking of, he’s a _predator_ —”

“They don’t call him the Black Lion for nothing.” They both laugh a bit at that, but Keith barely hears it through the sudden rush of blood in his ears.

_Black Lion._

Keith’s fists clench as waves of rage and grief surges through him, each one worse than the last. It’s a self-flagellation that he’s had three winters to perfect, one that simultaneously relieves and compounds his pain, a positive feedback loop that has no end.

He has only one point of reference for the Black Lion: only 48 seconds of grainy video feed, during which he mostly just stands at attention—until, of course, the very end—but it’s more than enough fuel to power Keith’s daydreams of driving his dagger through the half-mask until the skull crumples under his hands.

He imagines it once, and then again, and again. He listens to the fight and pictures himself standing in the ring instead of whatever meathead is there now. He thinks of Shiro, who had survived these contests for several months before, before they—

The Black Lion wins his first, an upset, and then the next, a cakewalk. During the ad break, Erock finishes the bottle with a loud belch. “Christ, that’s good.”

Keith opens his eyes to slits. “It’s absolute shit.”

Erock’s gaze drops to the little bottle. He turns it over in his hands a couple of times. “My daughter used to bring boxes of this stuff home during the holidays. Never told me how she got it. Probably stolen.”

“She served?”

“Yeah. Died a few months before the surrender.”

“Shit.” Keith swallows. “Sorry.”

Erock shrugs it off. “You served too, didn’t you? For the Garrison.”

The question doesn’t come out angry or hateful, just in Erock’s usual flat rumble, but Keith flinches away from it anyway.

“You have the same look she got, near the end,” Erock says, answering a question Keith hadn’t asked. “Empty. Like a painting. Or a dog that got beat too many times. I thought that it had only happened to the ones like us, but—” He breaks off and takes his hand away from the marks on his face. “Suppose that sort of thing hurts everyone just the same.”

Keith grunts. He closes his eyes again, suddenly exhausted, and they sit in silence for the rest of the afternoon, as the spitting radio regales the Galra’s bloody contests, as the heart of the ship hums and whirs somewhere very far away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said updates would be weekly......I am really sorry about that.........

Keith falls into the rhythm of routine.

He misses the quiet of the desert. He misses true sunlight. But in the city, at least, he can listen to the gladiator fighting. It’s one of the last concrete connections to Shiro that Keith has left, save for the scar on his leg, and he clings to it with the desperation of a drowning man. On the days when work keeps him from listening, he misses it like a phantom limb—which is all sorts of fucked up and misplaced.

It gets harder to sneak to Erock’s office. Security clenches so tight it’s a miracle Keith gets on the Antioch every day, let alone with the occasional illegal booze, but the Galra aren’t looking for faulty chips or smuggled alcohol. Something very big has them rattled, and it only gets worse as they days go by. Keith isn’t above acknowledging the satisfaction it gives him to see the ripples in their usually implacable façade.

It’s also impossible to ignore the way it affects Hunk, though he tries very hard to ignore it. What Keith had correctly identified as anxiety far too extreme to be simple first day nerves has ratcheted considerably since then. It leaves Keith crabby at the end of the day, exhausted by the constant low thrum of worry, and of Hunk’s countless strange habits. Like his refusal to touch the digital pad, or how he steals food during lunch, or how he asks questions about security that he thinks are subtle but really, really aren’t.

Two and a half weeks into winter season, Keith and Hunk spend an entire morning prying rusted metal panels off air compressors down in the loading docks. The metal is stupidly heavy and was screwed in way too tight when it got installed, which means one of them ends up holding the panel up while the other scurries around and muscles the last few bolts out as quickly as possible. It’s a lot of kneeling and squatting, and by the time afternoon rolls around, the pain in Keith’s leg is so loud he feels it in his fingertips.

For once, Hunk’s guilty stream of consciousness is a welcome distraction.

“—as far as mass-produced cafeteria fare goes, I have to say I’m impressed. I guess they have to keep us somewhat healthy, but there are so many easier ways to do it, so I wonder why they even bother—” He stops before he finishes the thought, but Keith hears it all the same, the wonder at the Galra’s thoughtfulness of their human peculiarities, and he also notices the quiet panic before the pivot: “All the other options would _suck_. I’m talking vitamin tablets. I’m talking smoothies—not the fruit kind. I mean the kind where vegetables and chicken get ground up too. Man, I’d kill to talk to the cook. I love making food, I’ve told you that, right? Everyone in my family is really good at it.”

He falters and watches Keith lever himself down to get the last set of screws, and Keith grits his teeth at the attention.

“Break after this one?” Hunk asks.

Keith, already on his knees, doesn’t answer right away. He works the remaining three screws out, and then he and Hunk carry the panel over to their growing pile of scrap. They toss it on with a great clatter, and Keith takes a moment to drag his fingers through his hair, tug the longer parts off his sweaty forehead. Hunk’s bright orange bandana suddenly doesn’t seem so goofy.

“I’m fine,” he says, then turns to head to the next air compressor.

Hunk grabs his arm. “No, really, we should take a break.”

Keith shakes him off. “I don’t need—” The words stick in his throat.

“Who said anything about you?” Hunk asks, and when Keith turns to him, he’s got an amiably neutral expression fixed on his face. “I’m tired, man, those panels aren’t exactly _light_. Besides.” He spins around and gestures at the spacious loading bay. “We’re way ahead of schedule, and this place is super cool. I want to check it out.”

“You already did that,” Keith says. “This is where you got lost your first day.”

A hot flush spreads through Hunk’s cheeks, and he ducks his head down. “Oh, uh. Yeah, I guess it is.”

Keith sighs. “Ten minutes.”

“Yessir.” Hunk delivers a sloppy salute, then spins around to head towards the room’s interior.

_(“Keith, come on,” Shiro said, his voice laden with exasperation._

_A burst of anger erupted in Keith’s chest. He threw his hand down. “This is stupid. Nobody’s going to notice, anyway.” When Shiro continued to stare at him, unimpressed, he bit out, “I’m_ doing it _.”_

_“You’re not.” Shiro demonstrated the salute again, and he went from sleep-deprived asshole to picture-perfect soldier in a moment. Then he wiggled his arm. “You keep tipping your elbow down, and it drags your whole head with it. You’re looking at the ground, for chrissake. It’s the most guilty-looking salute I’ve ever seen.”_

_Keith huffed a sigh, and then deflated a bit. “I’m nervous,” he admitted._

_“Of course you are,” Shiro said. “You’d be crazy not to. But if you don’t look like you fit in, you’re going to get found out before the first day’s up, and then it’ll be my ass on the line.”_

_This last bit was made lighter with a half-smile, but Keith understood—if only abstractly, through the context clues Shiro probably didn’t even realize he’d been dropping—how bad it would be if the General’s son was caught sneaking in an underage civilian, let alone one with Galran wiring. The Garrison would implode, and with it any hope of ever overcoming the Empire._

_Greater than his fear of discovery, however, was a burning desire, fiercer than anything Keith had ever felt before. It wasn’t just about his mother and her dagger. It was about making a difference. He knew he was good enough to do it. Hell, he was already as competent a pilot as Shiro, who was the Garrison’s fucking poster boy, and he was three and a half years younger._

_He tried again. He pulled his elbow up, tilted his chin higher, fixed his eyes on the junction where water-stained wall met sagging ceiling, let a little steel settle into his spine._

_Shiro let out a low whistle. "Well, hello there, Airman Reese."_

_Keith fought back his grin and stood there a little bit longer. When he finally relaxed out of the salute and looked to Shiro, the crinkly-eyed smile aimed at him was almost too bright to bear.)_

While Hunk explores, Keith sits with his feet dangling off the walkway and drinks treated water that tastes like chlorine. He squints out across the space, at the wide bay doors that stay open year-round and the lifeless cargo ships lined up along the back wall.

Overhead, seagulls scream and swoop around in the rafters. Underfoot, the ocean churns.

Hunk pokes his head into various nooks and crannies, teeters dangerously close to the edge of a loading dock, raps his fist against one of the cargo ships. He thinks he’s being subtle, but Keith did enough recon in the Garrison to know it when he sees it. He watches for several agonizing minutes. It’ll be suspicious if he ends the break early, but it gets increasingly more difficult to bear the discomfort of allowing it to go on. Once Hunk starts marching back and forth beneath a security camera, he calls it.

Hunk trots back over, then plops down beside Keith. His leg knocks against Keith’s and then stays there, and he doesn’t even seem to notice. “Cool space,” he says. “Have you seen those cargo ships? These things must be thirty years old, at least—whoa.”

Keith follows Hunk’s wide-eyed gaze down to his own hand, where he at some point crushed his water canister into a tight ball.

“That’s...” Hunk begins. He frowns thoughtfully. A pang of anxiety shoots through Keith. His immediate reaction to the scrutiny is a wild impulse to throw Hunk off the ledge, to dispose of any loose ends before they have a chance to fray— “Impressive, wow,” Hunk says. “You’re like, freaky strong. you don’t look _weak_ or anything, god, that is not what I meant. I knew you were strong. Just not _that_ strong. Or is it a hand thing? Just your hands? Do you climb? I hear climbers have, uh. Strong fingers.”

Keith blinks. “Climbers?”

Hunk looks pained and awkward for a second. It’s an expression Keith hasn’t seen in a long while, and his shoulders hunch a little bit at it, a knee-jerk remnant from a time when he still cared what people thought of him.

“Yeah, rock climbing,” Hunk says, too casual. “It’s a sport. You usually do it on big rocks. As the name would suggest.”

Keith huffs. “What would I even climb?”

They both take a moment to examine the room around them, and then also the edge of the city visible through the loading dock doors. It’s a whole lot of flat gray metal.

Hunk chuffs a laugh and picks at a chink in the walkway grating. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’re Spiderman. It would explain the super strength and general air of mystery.” He pauses. “Not that I’m like, _curious_ , or anything. Well, I mean I am, but just in the normal friend way, not in a weird creepy way. I’m not going to go snooping into your records. Not that I can, first of all that’s illegal, and also I’m not—I don’t even know _how_ , that’s Pid—” He coughs. “You probably don’t even know what Spiderman is! I only do because my town had a library, and there were some—”

“I know Spiderman,” Keith says, reeling a bit from Hunk using the word _friend_. “My dad had some of ‘em saved from when he was a kid.”

“Oh,” Hunk says, with some surprise, but then probably thinks that’s rude and keeps talking. “My cousins are all way younger than me, so when I started reading comics, of course they wanted to too. But instead of reading it themselves, they’d beg _me_ to read out loud to them. And I always hated it, ‘cause I had to describe each panel as I went.”

Keith looks over to see that his smile is a little bittersweet. “You miss them. Your family.”

“Oh man, all the time,” Hunk says. “Don’t you?”

He knows Hunk has probably conjured up some quaint country house for Keith in his mind’s eye, one with comic books stuffed under the bed, with a dad who was around and talked with his son about things as frivolous as childhood memories. He knows Hunk is referring to him, and to whoever else Keith might have shared that house with.

There’s an easy answer, then: no, Keith doesn’t miss it, because you can’t miss something you didn’t have.

But there are other kinds of family, ones that have nothing do with relation. Networks of unconditional support—like parents, he supposes, but in place because of protocol, rather than love. Siblings forged out of blood and metal, who would—who _did_ —die for him.

And a partner. A promise made not from a sense of duty or shared hardship, but the simple desire to exist together, to be each other’s, for as long as possible.

Keith clears his throat, forces down a dangerous lump. “Let’s. Get back to work.”

“Sure,” Hunk says, but then makes no moves of getting up. Neither, admittedly, does Keith. The breeze coming off the ocean buffets him, the closest he’ll get to real wind until summertime. The warm press of Hunk’s knee against his is more comforting than he’ll ever admit. They can afford to sit for a few more minutes; they really are ahead of schedule.

Keith takes a deep breath, feels something old and brittle shake loose in his chest.

It’s the first time in a long time he has felt anywhere close to content.

“Hey, uh,” Hunk begins, after a long stretch of quiet. “Speaking of past stuff, and I guess maybe also your stuff just in a general sense—not that I’m great at guessing this sort of thing, obviously, because boy was I surprised about the Spiderman thing. I always kind of imagined you growing up in some sort of evil orphanage, or maybe just appearing on the city streets as a fully-formed adult—”

Keith could fight the smile creeping onto his face, but he doesn’t. “Spit it out, Hunk.”

“Did you fight? In the Tech War?”

And just like that, every muscle in Keith’s body clenches.

The question itself is painfully invasive, bad enough—even worse is Hunk’s terminology. Only Garrison vets and sympathizers called it the Tech War. None of the Empire’s terms for it were ever so neutral or forgiving.

The question is a gesture of good faith, an acknowledgement of common ground, and it unequivocally confirms what Keith has been trying his best to ignore. Not because he wants plausible deniability when things inevitably go to shit, but because the more he gathers about this operation, the harder it gets, knowing there’s only one way for this mission to end: crushed to a pulp beneath the Empire’s heel.

The question is also an invitation. But Keith has had more than his fill of hopeless causes.

“No.” His response comes out flat.

Hunk’s face closes right off. “Sure.”

“I was too young.”

“Sure,” Hunk repeats.

And then he lurches up onto his feet, and Keith freezes still, his body tensing for a fight his heart can’t quite accept. Because this is _Hunk_ , but Hunk also a resistance fighter who just showed his hand to a stranger who could, in a matter of words, bring the entire mission to its knees.

Keith knows what he would have done, in Hunk’s position. What he had imagined doing minutes before. He grabs onto the ledge just as Hunk swings into motion, bracing himself for the oncoming attack, already preparing a return strike, but Hunk simply thrusts his hand in front of Keith’s face.

Keith looks up. Hunk’s expression is unreadable.

Without really knowing why, he lets Hunk haul him to his feet.

Hunk steps away immediately, out of arm’s reach. Keith is still holding his ruined water can in one fist. He turns from Hunk and tosses it off the ledge, and they watch together as it gets swallowed up beneath the waves. Capillaries of pale sea foam eddy through the seething black.

“Man,” Hunk says. “Littering is so not cool.”

“Hunk.” Keith’s eyes are stuck on the place where the metal ball disappeared.

“Yeah?”

“Whatever you’re—whatever it is. It’s not worth it.”

Voicing even that much sends a tremor through his limbs. Hunk doesn’t say anything for a little bit. When Keith finally looks over, it’s to a tight smile, one that suddenly makes Keith feel like the younger of the two. He wonders, dazedly, if maybe he is.

Hunk claps him on the shoulder. “No idea what you’re talking about, buddy.”

 

* * *

 

Three days later, Keith wakes up in sweat-soaked sheets and his head a void of screaming static, and even though the only thing he can remember from the nightmare is a tangle of malnourished limbs and the smell of moldy wet metal, it’s more than enough to guess what it had been about.

He doesn’t eat breakfast. He leaves his apartment queasy.

The particle barrier’s been set to replicate cloud cover today, so the entire city is coated in dark rotten egg yellow, rather than watery piss yellow. As a result, the air—made artificially humid—hangs low and heavy in the streets. Keith knows the barrier doesn’t change size between opacities, but it seems smaller when it’s visible like this, the curve of its domed surface now measurable, arcing low enough that one can now see that some of the city’s taller buildings almost do literally scrape the sky.

The sense of claustrophobia is made even worse by the insane amount of Galran soldiers swarming the docks. They aren’t checking containers or questioning workers anymore; instead they’re simply standing at grim attention at every corner, silent as death, as though they might be able to scare dissenters into confessing by the weight of their gazes alone. They clog the streets, shoving into people who don’t keep a proper distance away, watching everything with keen, half-lidded eyes.

“Kogane,” the security guard says. “Zone—oh.” Her eyes flicker towards the cleft-chinned Galran soldier standing beside her. Keith waits with his heart in his throat. “You’ve uh. Got a travel ban.”

Keith frowns. “What does that mean?”

She’s growing more uncomfortable, the soldier more animated. Every nerve in Keith’s body is screaming at him to run. He keeps his feet planted and waits for her to her to explain. “Something must’ve pinged during your entry interview.”

He doesn’t have the energy to rein in his anger. “You mean my interrogation,” he corrects, and the security guard winces. “Can I still work?”

“Yes. You just can’t leave Santa Maria,” she says.

“On pain of death,” the soldier adds.

“My vacation plans,” Keith deadpans, and the soldier sneers. He snatches his data card back. “They’re ruined.”

He feels eyes on his back all the way to the elevator. It makes his skin crawl.

Keith always meets Hunk either in the locker room or the mess hall, but today, Hunk isn’t in either of those places. A worm of anxiety coils in his stomach, but there’s no reason for it— _there’s no reason_ —so he smothers it with his still-fresh anger. Then he finds Amzi.

“ _Je_ sus, Kogane,” Amzi says, after Keith grabs him by the shoulder and twists him around. “Look a little _more_ murderous, why don’tcha.”

“Where’s Hunk.”

“Who?”

“ _Hunk_. The guy I’ve been training.”

Amzi scratches his chest. “Hunk, oh yeah,” he says, clearly nowhere closer to remembering. “Well, he’ll either show up, or he won’t. Kinda looks like you could do with some alone time, anyway, so why don’t you start on your work and I’ll send him along if he shows up.”

“When he shows up.”

Amzi waves a hand. “Whatever.”

Hunk never shows up.

Keith can only ask around so much before his concern becomes suspicious: workers ghost all the time, especially rookies who think they can handle the grind but then find out they really can’t. Keith’s unwarranted worry would only attract attention, and if Hunk has disappeared for the reason Keith suspects—attention is the last thing either of them need.

On top of this is the fact that Keith hasn’t exactly been fostering a particularly sentimental or caring personality these past few years, though he didn’t realized quite how deeply the reputation had set in until he makes a rare appearance at dinner, one last half-hearted attempt to catch sight of Hunk’s mop of dark hair.

“Kogane, you gotta stop _hovering_ ,” Lidda barks, twisting around on the mess hall bench to fix him with a one-eyed squint. “What the hell do you care where the kid went? Thought you’d be glad to have him out of your hair.”

“I’m surprised he lasted this long,” someone else pipes in. “Figured you’da pushed him off some ledge or something after like, the first day.”

This triggers a cascade of guffaws. Keith grits his teeth.

“Owes me money,” he mutters, which only makes everyone laugh harder. Lidda claps him good-naturedly on the arm, the only place they can reach while sitting, and the sensation of someone else’s skin rubbing against his makes Keith’s knees go wobbly, the dregs of last night still swirling in his head. He spins around and doesn’t take a breath until he’s out of the mess hall, knows all it’s going to smell like is the sharp and rank stench of too many bodies.

Once he’s alone, he sucks in a breath and gags. It’s short and silent, but it’s more of a concession than he’s ever allowed himself before, and it leaves him hot with shame. For three fucking years, he had survived out of sheer iron will. He had tamped every weak emotion, every moment of frailty deep down, but now—now it was all teeming dangerously close to the surface.

The walk to Erock’s office passes in a blur, his arrival nothing more than a volley of perfunctory greetings. He sits against the wall and lets himself feel hollowed-out and raw.

There’s no Black Lion today, just a series of low-profile fights between unranked warriors, which is just as well because all the commentators seem able to talk about is the melodrama spinning out between the Empire’s former heir-apparent and his parents.

“—no rules against it, as far as we’ve been able to figure, though Lotor doesn’t seem to be in any rush to act on his recent announcement—”

“Announcement is a bit of an understatement,” the other one says. “That whole thing read like a war decree. I know Lotor’s been out of the limelight for some time, after his fallout with Zarkon, but he seems just as sharp as ever, just as ready for a challenge—”

“Well, a challenge is exactly what he’ll be getting, if he’s serious about having a champion who can take on the Black Lion—”

The words pass through Keith but nothing sticks, his mind too full of images: Hunk caught, Hunk tortured and questioned, Hunk sent to the labor camps on Mars—or, if he’s lucky, neatly executed. When Erock’s coms bleep with an incoming call, it’s nothing short of a relief.

Erock opens the line. “Yeah.”

The grainy voice on the other end is hard-edged Galran, and it causes Erock’s spine to shoot ramrod straight. “Zone 4 Surveillance Room 6, confirm you have access to Security Cameras 4013a through 4013c.”

“Affirmative,” Erock responds.

“Do you see any unusual activity or unauthorized persons?”

Erock takes a moment to check. Keith follows his gaze to the three screens showing various angles of the loading hangar. One of them is pointed almost exactly where he and Hunk had been working in the beginning of the week. Another shows the long line of cargo ships. The last, open bay doors.

“That’s a negative,” Erock reports.

Something niggles at the back of Keith’s head.

“Keep an eye out,” the Galran says. “Call back if you see anything. Com line 2.” With that, the call goes dead.

“ _Shit_.” Erock blows out a breath and collapses backwards.

Keith drags his eyes away from the security camera feeds. “What?”

“Line 2 is for big-time stuff,” Erock says, and then reaches out to crank the radio volume down. “Sorry, kiddo, but I gotta pay attention for a bit.” He turns and gives Keith a slightly nervous grin. “How much you wanna bet they’re finally on the trail of whoever’s got the city in such a fucking tizzy.”

Keith’s throat is too tight for a reply. His eyes drift back to the screens. He stares at the spot where he and Hunk had sat and talked, and then he realizes with a cold jolt what’s wrong with the picture.

There’s a heap of used panels in the far distance, the scrap pile they had created—but that isn’t right. They had cleaned it up at the end of the day. And Keith had shown Hunk where large amounts of spent metal went, a great big chute that fed down to a furnace where it all got melted down and reused, and Hunk had asked, one innocuous question in a sea of them, whether workers could access the chute from higher floors, and Keith had said yes, there was a whole system of them running throughout the entire ship—

“Kogane?”

Keith looks around. Realizes he’s on his feet. He had thought—he had assumed Hunk’s mission was just infiltration, information gathering: the dinky sort of thing resistance groups think will make a difference but just end up failing. But this is something more. Something bigger, something that has equipped Hunk with technology advanced enough to dupe Galran security.

It makes sense then, Hunk’s interest in Zone 4, and the attention both Hunk and the Galra have been paying on the Antioch’s loading docks, the soldiers in the harbor.

This is an extraction.

“Hey, where you going?”

Keith pauses, his hand vice-tight on the door handle. He forces his voice to a dull monotone. “No point hanging around if the radio’s off.”

“Right,” Erock says, after a pause, and it’s fucking impossible to miss the hurt in his voice, but Keith tells himself it’s better than suspicion. He screws his eyes shut against the swell of guilt, resists the urge to turn and see the expression he knows is plastered on Erock’s face, a dry self-deprecation for thinking Keith cared about him. No surprise in it, just resignation because Keith is—always has been, always will be—a selfish piece of shit.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he forces out.

Erock sighs. “Yeah. See you.”

Keith slips soundlessly through the door. He closes it with a soft _click_ , stands in the hallway for the span of a heartbeat, long enough for second thoughts to creep in, to tie him to the spot.

 _This is insane,_ he tells himself. _This is pointless._

But his body is saying something different, screaming at him to go, to act, to _help_ , and Keith, when all is said and done, is nothing if not a creature of instinct.

He takes off running.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last hard science class I took was physics my senior year of high school (long time ago), and I honestly don't remember the last sci fi book I read. To say that this fic is putting my bullshitting capabilities to the test would be the most massive understatement.

The Antioch is eerily quiet, in direct contrast with the mess of anxiety and adrenaline pumping through Keith’s system as he hurtles through its halls. He doesn’t know where Hunk is; only knows that he’s probably planning to get out through the loading hangar—which will be one of the first things the Galra close off when they realize this entire thing won’t be as easy to head off as originally assumed.

Keith works through his options even as his feet carry him away from the offices and back towards the main area—he could go find the office of whoever remotely operates the doors, but soldiers will show up at some point to personally oversee the proceedings, and Keith can’t think of any viable scenario where he manages to hold control of the space long enough for Hunk to get out.

The only other option, as best as he can see it, is somehow using his Galra hardware to override the remote commands, which means getting down to the loading hangar.

He stops at a utility closet. This will probably be his last chance to get into any secure rooms, so he stocks up: protective goggles, somebody’s forgotten handkerchief, thick leather gloves.

Keith reaches the main elevator hub. He calls the first lift, disables the alarm trip, jams the emergency trap door shut, and then punches out the panel. An error light starts flashing, but the alert won’t be sent anywhere. Once the doors slide closed, swallowing up the frantic red pulsations, Keith calls the next one and does the same to it. He does this for all five elevators, and not once does he come into contact with anyone. It’s after hours now, all the workers gone home.

In the fifth elevator, he crawls up onto the top of the car, into the nearly pitch-black elevator shaft, and then locks the trap door shut.

Then he sidles around to the edge of the car, worms his way down between it and the wall, and then situates himself in the relative safety of a small alcove while he puts on his gloves. His heart, he notices distantly, is hammering in his chest, and he’s sweating, but his hands are steady. He allows himself a second to bolster, to check that everything is secure and where it should be, and then he jumps out into empty space.

He hits the thick metal cables with his whole body and free-falls for several heart-stopping moments before managing to grab on. Once the cables are done wobbling and he’s done swinging around, he takes one single steadying breath before letting his fingers loosen, and then he’s falling. His internal organs relocate somewhere in his chest cavity.

The floors of the Antioch speed by bursts of white, the hallway lights seeping through the doors. He counts each blip as it passes—first through the main floors and then down into the lower areas, where the air gets stale.

The further Keith descends, the louder the engines get. They echo and bounce all along the elevator shaft, the sounds warping until they’re more like the roaring of a great beast than any sort of lifeless machine. It makes Keith suddenly aware of how small he is, how insignificant. He has a moment to wonder what the hell he thinks he’d be able to do for these poor fucking resistance fighters—only a moment, though, because his floor is rapidly approaching and he has to slow himself down.

The ache of holding on so tight shoots up through his arms, but it’s a nice sort of ache, one that has nothing to do with bones or circuitry and everything to do with simple, slightly Galra-enhanced muscle.

He lowers himself down until he’s hovering directly in front of the elevator door. Swinging onto the ledge is tricky, as is forcing the doors open without tipping backwards. When he emerges into the service hallway, he’s panting and a little shaky.

Then, someone shoots him.

All he gets as a warning is the sharp sound of a weapon being fired, and it gives him just enough time to keep the beam from going right through his neck—right through his chip, which would’ve been immediate death for any full droid and very likely a slow and painful one for Keith. It gets him in the arm instead, which isn’t great, but it also isn’t dead.

He keeps his momentum going, uses it to roll off to the side where he can press up against the wall and hide behind a support beam. He presses a palm against his arm and hisses, the awfully familiar scent of blood and burnt flesh assaulting his nose, and then takes a moment to sit with the fact that it hadn’t been a Galran gun; he _knows_ what Galran ballistics sound and feel like, and this was familiar but not _that_ familiar, before he hears a familiar voice:

“Did you get ‘em?”

 _Hunk_. Relief sweeps through Keith, painful in a confused, aimless sort of way.

“I think so,” comes a different voice, this one higher and reedier. Keith pokes his head out from behind the small lip, has just a moment to trace the sounds to a cluster of toppled-over containers further down the hallway, to catch a glimpse of a keen, pointy face peering out from over them before he’s getting shot at some more.

He dives back down. “Hunk!” he shouts over the barrage. “Hunk, it’s me! Keith!”

It takes a while for the firing to stop. And before it does, the shots jerk around in spastic lurches, nailing the row of elevator doors and the opposite wall and even the ceiling, like the person shooting is either sneezing or is perhaps being forcibly divested of their weapon. At one point, an entire chunk of the ceiling comes crashing down mere feet away from where Keith is crouched.

“…Keith?” Hunk calls, a little breathlessly, once the figurative dust settles.

“Can I come out? Or is your friend gonna put more holes in me?” Keith asks.

“No promises, pal!”

“No, no, no,” Hunk shouts. “Yes promises! No holes. We promise, no holes!”

Keith slinks out and tries not to linger too long on how Hunk’s whole countenance relaxes when he gets eyes on Keith, the way the harried expression on his face melts into a cautious smile.

“Hey,” Hunk says.

He’s holding a gun, and the sight of it makes Keith wonder briefly if he’s suffering from brain damage, if maybe he hit his head in the elevator shaft, because it makes absolutely fuck-all sense that he would recognize the weapon nestled in Hunk’s arms, and not only recognize it, but _know_ it.

He knows it because it’s a Garrison weapon, or at least one based off of Garrison designs, because the Empire had seized and destroyed all Garrison property following their surrender. Hunk’s gun is souped up and tricked out, but it’s a Garrison weapon all the same, underneath all the new tech. Keith has held enough of those cannon blasters to know one when he sees it.

He doesn’t say anything though, just flicks his gaze to the other guy, who managed to hold onto his gun after all—and, god, _that_ one’s familiar, too—and has it trained on him. Keith brings his hands up. A rivulet of blood runs down into his armpit.

“This is the guy I told you about,” Hunk says happily.

His friend is not impressed. “Right, the one you blabbed our plan to, who has now very conveniently found us at the single most important moment in this entire operation.”

“The Galra know you’re on the move,” Keith says.

The guy snorts, but he does allow the gun to drift to a less vital spot on Keith’s body. “No shit.”

“They’ll be closing the hangar doors soon.”

He squints at Keith and then turns to Hunk. “You said he was human.”

Keith’s stomach swoops low.

Hunk frowns. “I did. He is.”

“You sure? He’s not some sort of droid that like—states obvious facts? Maybe it’s a Galra stalling tactic? Knowing you, you probably talked his ear off the whole time you were working together anyway, so it’s entirely possible you didn’t notice he wasn’t, oh I don’t know, _contributing anything meaningful_ —”

“I can override their remote commands,” Keith barks, causing both of them to startle cartoonishly. “If the Galra close the doors. I can open them back up for you.”

“How the _hell_ —”

“Do you want my help or not—”

“Hunk,” chirps another voice, a _third voice_ , and everyone draws short. “Come here, please. Bring your friend.”

“Are you serious?!”

Hunk beckons Keith forward with a grin, and Keith follows, eager to have something other than wide open hallway at his back.

The guy flails. “Fine. _Fine_ , but I want it on the record that if he turns out to be some sort of sleeper agent, I was right and you were wrong—”

Keith is sure the babble continues, but what greets him as he winds behind the barricade is enough to fade everything to nothing. There’s a girl kneeling in a sea of wires and screens, fiddling with a holographic pad, but it’s the nude figure lying prone in a small shipping container that stops him short.

He looks at the woman in the box, and all he can do is stare for several long moments. Her eyes—vacant, lifeless, gazing up into nothing—are cupped from beneath by dull crescent moon marks.

“That’s an Altean droid,” he says dumbly, forgetting for a moment that normal civilians, and probably a good number of non-civilians too, aren’t supposed to know what Alteans look like. And when he remembers, he’s still so stunned that he can’t bring himself to feel too chagrined about it.

The girl looks up from her work and fixes him with a look that is equal parts crazed and calculating. Keith has a floor-sweeping moment of déjà vu, but it dissolves as her eyes drift to his arm. “Lance!” she cries. “You shot him!”

“Jeez, guys, if you wanted me to just stand here and look pretty, you should’ve said.”

“I’m fine,” Keith says stiffly.

“He says that a lot,” Hunk says, and then plops down. “How’re we doing?”

“I’m done. Which is why I need you.”

Keith takes a better look at mess of equipment on the floor. He doesn’t recognize most of it, which is a strange feeling for him, but the stuff he does—two fat batteries, synthetic pads stuck on the Altean’s temples and throat, plasma packs—gives him a decent enough idea.

“You’re reviving her,” he says.

“We’re _sure_ he isn’t a droid.”

“Shut up, Lance,” the girl barks, and then turns to Keith. “We’re _attempting_ to revive her.” She gives him a quick smile. Her face isn’t soft, exactly, but it’s sweet in a freckled, bespectacled kind of way—enough maybe to trick people into assuming harmlessness. But Keith sees the sharp glint in her eyes, the jut of her jaw, and immediately knows that she is exponentially more dangerous than Hunk, Lance, and Keith combined.

“And,” she continues, “as much as I’m totally digging the snarky, angsty man bonding going on, we’ve got an extinct android to reboot. Hunk, if you could please take this—” She hands him two fat metal clamps, each attached to an end of the jumpstarting rig, “—and just hold them here—” She tips them down until they touch the metal lid of a nearby box, “—so we don’t all get electrocuted, that would be great. And _you_ ,” she says, turning to Keith, “I’m very glad you showed up, because I _could_ have done this part myself, but I really didn’t want to—”

“She doesn’t have any clothes on,” Keith interrupts.

The girl blinks at him a few times, nonplussed.

“Seriously?” Lance cries out in anguish. “Guys, _seriously?_ ”

“This is how she was being stored,” Hunk says.

“We can get her clothes once we’re out of here,” the girl adds, which—no. Keith stands up so quickly that she flinches. When he starts stepping out of his coveralls, her eyebrows shoot up. “Uh. We’re under a bit of a time crunch here.”

“I’m telling you guys, he’s stalling!”

“I don’t know where the fuck y’all come from that you don’t know this,” Keith says, “but droids aren’t— _robots_.” He lays his jumpsuit across the Altean. Everyone is staring up at him like he’s just sprouted a very smelly second head.

“I thought you said this guy fought for the Garrison,” Lance says.

“I did. He did.” Hunk frowns. “I thought he did.” This last bit sounds a little hurt, but Keith is already crouching back down. He doesn’t give a shit what they think, especially when, for fucking once, he’s in the right.

“Um.” The girl blinks, then frowns down at her holographic pad. She points to a series of empty graphs. “Okay. Keep an eye on these numbers here. They’ll fill up once electricity starts running through the circuit. Let me know if any of the graphs turn yellow, shout if they go red. Hunk, you ready?”

“Yeah.”

She blows out a shaky breath. “All right,” she says. “Here goes everything.”

Keith’s too busy staring at the graphs to see what happens next, but it’s all over in a matter of seconds. Every graph remains green, the current stays steady, and then the droid is jerking upright, heaving for breath, tattoos glowing a bright, vibrant pink.

It’s pretty fucking anticlimactic, considering.

“Pidge,” Hunk says, and Keith thinks for a moment it’s some sort of code word, or a trigger word, but then: “Pidge, you are a genius, you are one-of-a-kind, I cannot be _lieve_ —”

“Hi,” Pidge says to the Altean, voice soft with awe. “You must be Allura.”

Allura—does Keith recognize the name? He can’t be sure—brushes a tuft of hair out of her face and then blinks great big turquoise eyes at all of them. Everyone is motionless, hardly daring to breath. Even Lance has turned to peer over his shoulder with a vaguely slack-jawed expression plastered on his face.

“Yes,” Allura says. She takes in the pile of boxes, the dingy hallway, her grubby companions. “Where are we? Where is Coran?”

Keith looks to the others. They all seem nonplussed.

“Who?” Hunk asks.

Allura frowns. “ _Coran_. We had been hidden together. We were supposed to…”

She trails off. Hunk is shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Our intel only ever mentioned one Altean.”

She stares at him, mouth parted. Keith's seen that expression enough times to know just how much it costs her now to sweep it off her face. It’s very clear that things are not right, that these are not the circumstances she had been expecting to wake back up into, but it all gets forcibly buried away. She looks down at herself, then blushes.

“I’m naked.”

“Maybe it’s just a droid thing,” Lance remarks thoughtfully, and then there’s burst of purple light overhead and he jerks forward with a grunt, blood spurting out from his chest. Someone screams—probably Hunk—while Keith scrabbles over to get a look around the containers.

A squadron of Galran soldiers has posted up at the end of the hallway, in front of the elevators, spraying their makeshift defense with heavy artillery fire. The purple beams ricochet off of the barricade, searing stains into the walls and floor, filling the air with smoke and the smell of overhot metal.

“Surrender now,” blares a voice from down the hall. “And your deaths will be swift.”

Keith ducks back down. Lance is pale and sweaty but definitely still alive, and Allura has donned the navy blue coveralls. Hunk has taken Lance’s spot on the wall and is returning fire to keep the soldiers from storming over. Everyone else is staring at him expectantly.

“There are thirty Galra down at the end of the hallway,” he says.

Pidge swears violently. “I wanted to do a data pull.”

“I’ll hold them off,” Lance says. “Buy you some time.”

“No, no way,” she says, shaking her head even as she starts scooping up all her gear. “There are way too many, you can’t take them all—”

“I don’t have to,” Lance interrupts. “I just need to slow them down.”

“Lance—”

“I’ll stay back with you,” Hunk offers, desperate.

“You’re the engineer, man, you have to go. Besides,” he says, with a tight grin, wincing as he shifts his weight. “I’d just slow you guys down.”

“No, no, no way—”

“Hunk, buddy, I love you, but there’s no way I’m letting you die for no—”

Another volley of shots spray across the top of the barricade, and everyone curls down tighter.

“I’ll stay,” Keith says. “I’m expendable.”

“Jesus, _grim much_ ,” Lance mutters, but he doesn’t seem too torn up about having company.

“Surrender now,” comes the warning once more. “And your deaths will be swift.” If the fact that the Galra have that phrase pre-recorded doesn’t spell out every single thing wrong with their Empire, Keith isn’t sure what does.

“Shit, okay, shit,” Pidge shouts, then rounds on him and Lance. “You two. Hold them off for a few minutes, that’s all I need. Then get out of here. I mean it. Don’t get fucking killed. _Lance_ ,” she says over his protestations, “I outrank you, and that’s a fucking order.”

“What about the hangar doors?” Hunk asks.

The manic gaze swings to Keith. “How were you going to override the remote control?”

Keith opens his mouth dumbly, has absolutely no clue how to make _just stick my hand in there and think really hard_ sound productive and non-incriminating, but he’s saved from even having to attempt it by Allura.

“I can do it,” she says. All of her earlier distress is gone, replaced now by a flat, cool control, but her gaze turns inquisitive as it slides over to Keith. He turns away, having absolutely no interest in addressing that now or ever, and allows Hunk to shove the cannon blaster at his chest.

His hands slot right into place. The familiar heft of the gun nearly pulls him into a dangerous place, but he heads the breakdown off at the pass, shuts down that part of his brain so all that’s left is the training, the reflexes, the soldier’s impulse to survive. It’s surprisingly—worryingly—easy to do.

“Good luck,” Hunk says, and then he and the others are off, running, and Keith listens as their pounding boots and the pitpat of Allura’s bare feet fade down the hallway, towards the loading hangar.

“Hope you know what you’re doing,” Lance mutters.

Keith doesn’t respond, simply breaks away towards the opposite wall and ignores Lance’s shrieks of concern. He wants a different angle, one closer to the Galra, and there’s the added benefit of attracting the Galrans’ attentions, now that he’s the far less protected one, which provides Lance the opportunity to take his time with the shots, settle into a rhythm without having to duck away so often.

The soldiers are clearly not the Empire’s brightest. Keith and Lance make quick work of them, but their numbers never dwindle. Backups keep stepping forward out of the shadowed hallway behind to take the place of their fallen comrades.

The sight would have filled Keith with despair had he been suffering any illusions that they were getting out of this alive. But he isn’t, and so it doesn’t. He just keeps shooting. He’ll keep shooting either until his gun runs out of ammo or he gets killed, whichever comes first.

It’s simple math: the longer they hold off the soldiers, the better chance the others have of getting out. By the grim set of Lance’s jaw, he’s on the same page. So Keith steadily picks Galran soldiers off and waits for something to give.

It happens sooner than Keith expects, and not in the way he expects. It’s precluded first by an incredibly enthusiastic volley of shots, one that pins him behind his shoddy wall support, feeling each photon beam like a punch in the back, and he sees that Lance is receiving the same treatment, and it’s really only a matter of chance—or perhaps it’s a gut feeling, a pull in his stomach that tells him they’re trying to divert his attention—that he chances a peek just at the moment one of the soldiers steps forward and lobs a small grenade down the hall.

Lance sees it too, swings his gun up to take aim. Keith pops out from behind the wall, drops into a low roll, draws the eyes of every single Galra soldier to him.

He hears Lance take the shot, and it’s the last thing he hears for a little bit because everything goes bright white and terribly loud. The bomb explodes so forcefully that Keith gets knocked over and then slides on his face for several feet, and by the time he manages to prop himself on an elbow Lance has already reached him and is tugging him the rest of the way up.

“Sorry, Jesus, sorry,” he’s babbling, pale-faced and trembling. Blood leaks from a cut somewhere in his hair, and he’s clutching at his rib, where he got hit earlier. His gun is gone. “I should’ve—”

The ground goes liquid. Keith thinks it’s his balance, an eardrum ruptured or something, but Lance staggers alongside him. They both cast glances back to watch several Galran soldiers tumble down into the gaping hole that’s opened up in the floor, that is spreading and making everything wobble like a sine wave.

Keith lets himself get dragged away.

Their sprint to the hangar isn’t too bad, considering Keith spends most of it struggling to stay upright. Lance is the only reason he doesn’t collapse; he’s surprisingly sturdy for having such a beanpole-like physique, and he seems much more amenable towards Keith now that he’s almost accidentally killed him with a grenade.

The hangar is on fire. Keith sees the angry red shadows flickering over the walls, feels the intense heat, but knowing it doesn’t soften the blow one bit of when he rounds the bend and finds every single cargo ship burning.

The hangar doors are open, but it’s a bitter victory: right outside, buffeted slightly by the coastal wind, hover several sleek-looking Galra ships. Floodlights at the ships’ noses paint the scene in garish yellow light, throw dancing shadows onto the walls and ceiling. All the ships—guns included—swing towards Lance and Keith when they come tearing into the room.

Hunk, Allura, Pidge—none of them are anywhere be found. Keith can’t help but stare at the charred cargo ships, feeling sick to his stomach. He _knew_ the plan was doomed from the start. He had been an idiot to pretend otherwise.

Lance isn’t looking at the cargo ships. In fact, he doesn’t even break stride, simply keeps running towards the middle of the hangar floor. His grip on Keith’s arm tightens, leaving Keith with no option but to stumble along. The walkways are slick with ocean water, and the putrid smell of rotten seaweed burns Keith’s nostrils. His hair whips in his face, the tie long-gone.

“Open up!” Lance screams, at nothing.

The squealing whine of short-burst laser beams erupts from all around. The shots ricochet at their feet, close enough that Keith feels the heat through his boots.

“Shit!” Lance yelps. He skips to the side and nearly stumbles off the walkway. Keith grabs him by the arm and slings him around, grunts as a glancing shot skims his calf: not a direct hit, but deep enough to sear. He hoists Lance up around the armpits and keeps running, even though he has absolutely no idea what they’re supposed to be running towards.

And then, right before his eyes, a cargo ship—shitty, old, blessedly whole—flickers into view, right smack in the middle of the hangar. The cockpit hatch pops open to reveal Hunk, Allura, and Pidge all crowded inside, screaming, but between the raging ocean, the Antioch’s engine, and the gunfire, their words are lost.

Keith and Lance take the last few yards at a dead sprint, clutching each other for dear life as all around them the hangar goes up in flames. Allura’s at the lip of the door, and she grabs Lance first, hauls him up onto the ship. Keith’s momentum has him ready to launch himself right behind them, but he digs his heels in at the last moment.

Allura turns and frowns down at him, then throws her hand out. “Are you coming?”

Keith is frozen, but it’s only for a moment. Just a moment, because if he doesn’t start moving, they’re all dead. Because he had already made his decision, several times over. He could have broken away a hundred times between Erock’s office and here and hadn’t.

It’s harder than he thinks, crossing the threshold from whatever he is now to something else—something active _. S_ omething meaningful. And it hurts, because the last time he had been either of those things, he hadn’t been alone—had been the very opposite of alone.

Heart in his throat, he grips Allura’s arm and climbs on board.

 

* * *

 

_(Keith couldn’t have been outside Iverson’s office more than ten minutes before Shiro came back out, but in that time he had managed to swing back and forth between dread and anticipation so many times he wasn’t sure where one ended and the next began. He was so deep in his head that he didn’t even realize the door had opened until Shiro’s voice cut through the white noise of his thoughts._

_“Thank you, sir,” Shiro was saying, deferential but firm, and then he was closing the door softly behind him. He paused to give Keith an exasperated look before heading down the hallway. Keith pushed off against the wall and fell in step beside him._

_“You didn’t have to wait,” Shiro said._

_Keith ignored him. It was the opening to an argument neither of them ever won. “How’d it go?”_

_Shiro held up an access card._

_The sight of it made Keith’s stomach swoop, though there was no real reason for it. Shiro getting the room had never been a question. “Was Iverson suspicious?”_

_“He was too busy laughing at me for scheduling a formal request to be suspicious.”_

_“Well,” Keith said. Wordlessly, they took the turn that led to the officers’ quarters. “The room_ has _been sitting unused for over a year.”_

_Shiro’s expression tightened. He had always been so uncomfortable with his father’s influence, embarrassed about how quickly he was progressing through the ranks, and Keith knew how much it was killing him to be finally taking advantage of the benefits, no matter the reason. “I didn’t need it. My old one was fine.”_

_“And dressing up was a little dorky.”_

_“It's protocol,” Shiro said._

_Keith snorted, which finally caused Shiro to grin bashfully, and they walked in comfortable silence for as long as it took to get to Shiro’s new quarters._

_Shiro, to his credit, didn’t falter—simply swiped the card across the reader and shoved the door open. Keith followed close behind, propped himself on the desk while Shiro tossed his hat on the bed and did a slow circuit._

_Late afternoon sunlight peeked in through half-open shutters, making the pin on Shiro’s uniform wink cheerfully. He drifted into the middle of the room, stuck his hands on his hips, then turned to give Keith a raised-eyebrow look. His hair, finally free of the cap, stuck up in random tufts. “Not too shabby.”_

_He was right. It was a nice room. It had a walk-in closet and a view of the Garrison’s central courtyard, and the bed was wide enough to fit two people without requiring acrobatic feats. Most importantly, Shiro would have his own bathroom._

_“You might not even need it,” Keith blurted out. “All those hot zone projections are completely theoretical. I asked Matt and he thinks they could be off up to 600 rads—”_

_“Keith,” Shiro said._

_“You don’t have to do this,” Keith said and knew he sounded like he was begging, he_ was _begging, but Shiro just shook his head._

_“You know I do.” His face, lit up in bands of gold and gray, was painfully, shatteringly somber. “Keith, if there’s even the smallest chance we can make a difference... You know I have to take it.”_

_Keith swallowed, said, “I know.”_

_And he did. He did know. Because this was the other half of the same goddamn argument they were always having—that they’d probably keep on having, at least until one of them was dead, enemy fire or radiation sickness or one of the thousand other dangers constantly looming over their heads—and if Shiro couldn’t win it, then neither could Keith. It didn’t matter who started where; nobody ever came out on top. There was only ever one way out, and that was together or not at all._

_It was hard, fighting a losing war alongside the person you loved most—as much a comfort as it was a cataclysm._

_It was the beginning of the end, and Keith had been the one to bring them to it.)_

 

* * *

 

The moment the cargo doors shut, they’re in the air. Pidge is in the pilot’s seat, throwing the ship forward and out of the hangar. She aims down at the gap beneath the Galran ships, and the craft clumsily squeezes through, jostling violently at the partial collision. Lance, who had been on his way to the pilot seat, staggers, bangs into the wall, and then lists to the side. Allura grabs him before he can crack his head on anything.

“Are you all right?” she asks, eyes wide.

Lance tips his head back, regards her blearily. “You’re very pretty,” he slurs. “For a droid.”

All the warmth vanishes from Allura’s face. She lets out a noise of disgust and then lets him slip to the ground in a boneless heap. “Your pilot is unconscious,” she informs Pidge flatly.

This causes Pidge to jerk the controls and then swear violently as they nearly careen right into the ocean. Hunk lets out a little whimper.

They’ve done something to the engine, given it some extra power, because the ship’s response to Pidge’s attempts to correct course is surprisingly agile. It’s a short term fix, though. Already the ship is struggling to keep up with the extra power, making noises no cargo ship should ever make, and every single plate and screw holding the thing together is rattling loosely.

“This is so not ideal,” Pidge mutters.

As if her point needs proving, five Galran police crafts rise up off the docks and immediately start firing. They’re fairly easy shots to dodge, but Pidge has clearly not been trained because it seems like every single one manages to hit. Keith slams into Allura, loses all his breath. They both barely manage to brace themselves against the dashboard before they’re slammed again, this time from behind. Small alarm bells begin to chime.

Keith holds onto Pidge’s seat with a white-knuckled grip, partly because if he doesn’t he’s going to break his neck, partly because all of this—being in a cockpit, dodging enemy fire, fighting the Galra—has got his knees weak.

“There’s too many of them!” Hunk says. “We need the cloaking back up!”

“Yeah, well, I’m a little busy at the moment!” Pidge shouts back, throws the ship sharply to the side to dodge an oncoming Galran jet. The entire craft moans with the strain of changing direction so suddenly, and Keith grits his teeth as its belly scrapes against the tops of some dockside buildings.

Instead of heading into the city to shake off pursuit, to lie low until they could move again, Pidge veers left, _hard_ , until they’re heading northeast. There’s nothing in this section of city, just a bunch of industrial plants and then the particle barrier beyond, and then Keith realizes that’s how they’re getting out: straight through the particle barrier.

“ _Pidge!_ ” Hunk shrieks, and the craft once more shudders upon impact, this time with an errant surveillance buoy. Keith hears several layers of outer metal sheets get peeled away. Pidge swerves but immediately has to lurch away again in order to avoid colliding headlong with an Empire patrol.

“Guys,” Lance moans from the floor. “I don’t feel so good.”

They’re hit again, and then again. Keith realizes, with quiet dread, that they’re all going to die if something doesn’t change, _soon_.

“Get up,” he says.

“What?” Pidge asks.

“Get up,” he repeats.

Pidge gapes. “You can’t be—”

An explosion hits them somewhere from above. A red light on the control panel begins flashing, followed shortly by a low, pained rumbling from somewhere in the back of the ship. Keith knows without having to look at the dashboard—can just feel it—that the anterior thruster has begun to fail. Keith's heartbeat begins to fly.

“If you don’t let me fly,” he says, and knows there’s too much steel seeping in his voice, but he can’t help it, “we’re dead.”

Pidge stares at him, dumbfounded, and then gets up. Keith doesn’t allow himself a single moment of hesitation or pause before sliding in. The moment his back presses against the chair, he knows he’s made a devastating mistake, but he also knows he doesn't have a choice. He forces himself to take the steering controls.

Joy and revulsion swell simultaneously within him. He feels the engine rumbling unhappily in his fingertips, senses the drag from the nearby solar flares, anticipates the trajectories of both this ship and the enemy crafts as they swoop down towards him. It all falls over him like a net, one that used to cradle him and now threatens to smother.

“Hold on,” he says, and it’s the only warning he provides before rolling the ship over and falling into a spiral that has every person in the bridge yelling. He keeps it smooth, makes sure the torque doesn’t wrench anyone off their feet, but it still isn’t a pleasant sensation. He feels in his palms the ship juddering with the strain of doing things it isn’t supposed to do, at speeds it isn’t supposed to reach. They don’t have much time before the whole thing falls apart from overstrain.

He thinks, with a manic sort of amusement, that he can empathize.

He levels the ship out, and a few moments later Pidge throws herself into the next chair over. “Through the barrier?” he asks.

“Through the barrier,” she confirms. She’s got her holographic pad back, is working through a complicated series of commands, and then pauses. “Shit, you have a chip.”

Keith splices the air between two oncoming enemy crafts, leaving them in the dust. He doesn’t waste a moment in plummeting straight down and then veering east, away from the ocean, so he can zip through a series of wide, empty roads that used to serve as storage space for extra train cars. He hears several Galran ships coming up from behind, gaining rapidly.

“We need more speed,” he roars.

“On it!” Hunk says, throwing himself out of his chair to get down underneath the control panel. Keith looks up at the particle barrier, at the desert beyond. It’s too dark by this point to tell for sure, but he thinks he sees movement outside, great swirling clouds of dust that lick up along the barrier like crashing waves.

“Won’t the ship shut off?” he asks Pidge. “When we go through?” It was standard safety protocol; any unregistered ships that left the city were immediately killed.

“Yeah, well.” She scratches her chin. “Allura’s going to take care of that. As well as she can, anyway.”

Several shots are fired. Keith keeps out of their range. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means getting those hangar doors open weakened me more than I had expected,” Allura answers. “I'll do my best to power the ship back up once we’re through the barrier, but I don’t have much energy left.”

“There’s nothing on board we can use? Some other power source?” He swings hard to the left to keep the end of the ship from careening into the awning of a corner store announcing in loud letters, BEST SNARFLAK WEST OF THE EDEN CRATER! He guns the engine. It responds grudgingly.

“No,” Pidge says. “It’s all being used to keep the ship running. Oh. _Oh._ Hunk’s gun! Hunk’s gun has a small reactive core. You held onto it, right?”

“It’s somewhere in here,” Keith replies, and then Pidge is gone.

They’re getting close to the edge of the city, only a minute till they hit the barrier. Keith starts flying up at an angle, less concerned now with dodging fire and more with making sure they hit the barrier high enough. They’re still being pursued, but it seems the soldiers have cottoned on to Keith’s intent and are perfectly fine with sitting back and watching him fry the ship.

Just then, the engine kicks into a gear higher than Keith thought possible, and some of the loose rattling increases to a worrying degree. He swings his head around and finds Hunk on his back beneath the dash, grease splashed across his face and various tools in his hands and between his teeth. He gives Keith a thumbs up.

Keith smiles back, brittle as glass, and then he thrusts the ship forward. It lurches and screams, and the particle barrier encroaches. He can’t see it anymore, not this close up, but he can feel it, a wall of crackling power so potent it makes the air ripple faintly in errant patches, makes the hair on his arms stick up.

“I’m here,” comes a breathless voice, and Keith twists to see Allura with Pidge, the small green core of the gun sitting in her hand like a gemstone. He meets eyes with her. It’s a heavy look, full of questions, but there’s no time to delve into them, so he instead nods and jerks his chin to his right, to the empty chair beside him.

“I’ll tell you when,” he says. “The longer we can hold out, the farther away we’ll be when the Galra see that we’re back online. We’ll have a better chance of losing them.”

“All right,” she says, settling in next to him.

“Brace for impact!” Keith bellows, and then they hit it.

Hit probably isn’t the best word. The ship passes through easily enough, but the ramifications are immediate. Between one heartbeat and the next, every system on the ship goes dark with a sigh of escaped energy, at the same time as they emerge into a loud and angry sandstorm. And Keith—his teeth clench as a surge of electricity erupts in the back of his neck, cleaving his skull and leaving him a little weak in the hands, and then the ship is in freefall.

They’re several hundred feet up, and it doesn’t take long for a craft this large to pick up speed. Though there are still rhythmic aftershocks of electricity pulsing through Keith, a fucked-up sort of countdown, his hands remain still on the controls.

He had been taught a lot of things at the Garrison. A steady grip was not one of them.

He does his best to keep them pointed northeast. Howling wind pummels all sides, and more than once he nearly loses out against the sheer force of the storm.

“Uh,” someone says, with feeling, as they continue to plummet, and as the ground comes closer more and more quickly. “ _Uhh!_ ”

“Not yet,” Keith mutters. Sweat spills down his temple. He closes his eyes. He can see in his mind the arc the ship will take, if Allura manages to do this.

“Hey, _dude!_ ”

“Now!” Keith barks, eyes flying open, and Allura slams her open palm against the dashboard, and then thin paths of green light shoot out from it like circuitry, or like a root system, until the entire cockpit is lit up by the strange and beautiful fluorescence. And though none of the screens come back on, Keith knows that the ship will respond to him, can feel its life force, now more potent than ever now that Allura’s part of it too, and so he kicks it forward, and it _flies_ , it slices through the storm like a blade.

Hunk lets out a joyous, stunned shout. Pidge leans forward, the light reflecting against her glasses, her face cracked wide open with amazement.

“We did it,” she says. “We’re out!”

“They might still follow,” Keith says.

“No, they won’t.” She pulls her pad up and starts typing madly. Keith looks at her, and he feels once more like he’s slipping out of time when he does so, and he doesn’t know what’s causing it, might be the fact that he’s sitting in the pilot’s seat of an aircraft, or maybe it’s the fact that the look on her face is one he’s seen before, or maybe it’s just the particle barrier fucking up his head.

“Cloaking is weird,” she says, completely oblivious to his dissolving thoughts. “It turns on and can really stay on as long as there’s a sufficiently constant energy source. But once it’s off, I can’t just flip a switch. A bunch of triggers have to be reset in order to do it again, and it’s delicate work. If it goes wrong, the whole system just—” She makes a motion with her hand. “Shuts off completely.”

Keith looks behind them. Moving his head sends sparks jumping down his spine, crackling out into his fingertips, but he needs to check.

He sees at least twenty black specks through the haze of wind-whipped dirt, and they’re growing larger. Whatever burst of power Hunk had managed to coax out of the ship has long since been burned through, and even with Allura’s support, they’re in no shape to be outpacing government vehicles. All he can hope for at this point is to hold out long enough for the Galrans to have to turn back around and seek refuge, or succumb to the storm before they do.

“But with Allura as the source,” Pidge continues, “those switches can get reset no problem. So—” She punches a button, and a vibration starts up around the ship before settling into a tight hum. Allura lets out a little gasp, and the green lights all dim significantly. Pidge doesn’t seem to notice. “Ta-da! We’re invisible again.”

The police ships won’t be able to come out much further from the city than they already have; they aren’t built for it. This cargo ship isn’t, either, but no one on board has any intentions of returning to the city so it’s a bit of a moot point. He thinks he should probably just keep flying straight out, either until they run out of fuel or until he finally succumbs to the barrier’s charges, whichever comes first.

The decision is made for him. Allura takes a shaky breath and then falls back in her chair. The nuclear core clinks to the floor, utterly spent, and at the loss of contact, the ship goes completely dead once more.

They’re closer to the ground this time, so the crash isn’t a catastrophic thing, but it’s still rough. Keith keeps them flat enough that the ship simply scrapes along the ground, metal underfoot screaming and groaning. They hit a ridge in the sand and the craft judders so violently Keith is shocked he doesn't crack a tooth.

They eventually come to a grinding halt with a final, percussive jerk. All Keith can see out the front windshield is a swirling mass of brown dust, silent and consuming. The wind whirls, but it’s a distant thing. He takes a breath, feels it shudder in and out of him. Pain lances through his skull. His hands, vice-tight on the controls, fall to his sides.

The danger is over, the adrenaline faded into something decidedly sour, and it’s like a floodgate falls down inside of him. His next inhale catches and doesn’t unstick. He reaches down, digs a shaking finger into his thigh, tries to get the pain of the scar to sear away the sickness in his stomach and in his head. It doesn’t work. Bile rises in his throat, sharp and hot, and he manages two shaky steps out of the chair before he’s got his head in a storage hatch that popped open during the landing, emptying his stomach into it.

“Aw, man,” Hunk moans. “That’s super gross.”

Keith goes to his knees, presses his forehead against the metal panelling. Memories burst into his skull unbidden, fractured images folding in on each other, one after the next, and any attempt to wrestle them under control is thwarted by the currents of white-hot electricity that are pounding into him now at an unbearable frequency. He takes a breath and it sounds like a sob.

“Hey, you okay?” a voice asks, closer than Keith would like. Tentative fingers brush his shoulder, and it takes everything in Keith to not crush them in his fist, not to take them in his hand and hold them tight, _please don’t let me go, Shiro, please don’t leave me_ —

He blinks. There’s a face in front of him. It swims for a long moment, two holographs drunkenly orbiting each other, both of them sandy-haired and painfully earnest.

“Matt?” he blurts. It comes out slurred, and it causes the person before him to jerk away as though he’s struck them. They—it can’t be Matt, though, because Matt died, he watched Matt _die_ —are saying something to him, but the words have faded in favor of a great howling, the sound of a fighter jet screaming through the upper stratosphere, the sound of a roaring crowd so clamorous the ground shakes, the sound of his femur as it snaps in half—

The killing blow arrives in a blinding wave of static. It’s the barrier’s final, conclusive defense, and it sweeps through him without quarter.

He is swallowed by blackness. He goes gladly.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You know that thing that happens when you stare at a word for too long and it suddenly becomes gibberish, and then you're worried it actually is gibberish, so you edit it a bunch and then squint at it for a while and then edit it some more, and then you panic 'cause it's kind of back to the way it was at the beginning but now Pidge has like 200% more curse words and for some reason all the action's been cut so now the entire chapter is just two people whisper-yelling at each other for 3000 words? No?? Just me???

When Keith dreams, it’s of the desert—of red and purple sunrises.

His nightmares are not so gentle.

He’s in a room full of restless shadows and slanted light, a landscape of shifting polarities, and he can’t find his footing. There is a noise in his head. The sound of something shattering. Or maybe just the echo.

There is a person sprawled before him. Keith realizes with a jolt that it’s Shiro—his familiar curves and planes, that proud span of shoulder, those pale curled fingers. He is laid out in a disc of ink-black iridescence. Like spilled oil, or the scales of a snake.

Its surface quivers, a small tremulous thing, but it isn’t Shiro that’s stirring; it is the black pool shuddering to life around him. It wobbles and frets, and then before Keith can even take a single breath, can even form the name sitting at the tip of his tongue, it pulls Shiro’s body beneath its surface.

Keith throws himself forward. He plunges his hands down into the liquid. He can’t _feel_ it—it’s the exact same temperature as his body, the exact same viscosity as the air—but he knows there is something wrong about it, something cloying and irrevocable about the place it is trying to take Shiro, and he can’t— _he won’t let go_.

“Shiro, please,” he wants to say, but he can’t spare the breath, and he’s already said those words, a lifetime ago. They echo around the space anyway. They bounce off the walls and the sludge and his ribcage, two broken bytes of sound shattered beyond repair.

The hold on Shiro vanishes and Keith falls backwards. Shiro comes sliding out after him, Keith’s grip tight around his wrist, but his weight is still too heavy, too limp, and where there should be relief in Keith’s chest is nothing but cold dread. When he twists Shiro’s murky form closer, tucks him into the valley between his legs, pulls him up against his chest, he realizes why.

There is no head. Where there should be a head is nothing but a gaping maw of meat and fat and bone. Grief cracks open inside of Keith, but it’s strangely familiar, as though something like this has happened before.

Something changes in the air.

The oil spill is gone. In its place is a figure cloaked in smeary black, all the fury and cruelty Keith had thrown his hands into—that still clings to him and Shiro—coalesced into a humanoid form. Extending from its arm is a blade that hums and fizzes with bright purple heat. In its light Keith catches fragments of a mask, blank and cold and alien.

There is suddenly no other thought in Keith’s mind than to get him and Shiro as far away from that thing as possible, as quickly as possible.

He tries to drag Shiro back, but Shiro is no longer in his arms, he’s on the ground, and Keith is no longer there with him. He’s hanging by his wrists. He’s strung up like a pig. His toes barely scrape the ground and his shoulders are screaming.

The figure lurches forward. It moves like an atomic bomb, like acrid smoke as it pours out across the desert, slow and savage and sure.

It steps over Shiro’s corpse and raises its bladed arm.

Keith looks into the mask. Into a pair of eyes senseless with terror.

Then the Black Lion punches straight through his chest.

 

* * *

 

Keith wakes up, the sounds of his heaving breaths swallowed up by layers of groaning that fill his head and shudder through his bones. He jerks his arms forward, desperate to pat himself down, to check that there isn’t a hole in his chest, but there’s something tight around his wrists, and his arms stay pinned behind his back.

A light flares, cutting through the dark. He barely manages to suppress a flinch when a half-illuminated face suddenly appears before him, expression dead and haunted. His breathing goes rough, vision receding, and he wonders if maybe he’s dead and this is hell, or—god—maybe he’s been captured, maybe this is how the Galra break him—

Their hand comes up. This time Keith does flinch, but instead of a blade ripping through bone and sinew, all he gets is a brisk slap across the cheek, just forceful enough to knock him out of his spiralling thoughts and back into his body.

Keith pants his way through the comedown. It’s the wind, he realizes, that’s so loud, the wind and the ship creaking in response. He’s leaning against a wall and can feel the sand storm raging on the other side, pounding into his back. His shirt is cold with sweat, and the back of his neck—right where his chip is—burns.

He realizes, extremely belatedly, that the light before him is soft and steady blue, not purple, and the chinks of reflective glass aren’t goggles from a face mask—they’re glasses.

“Pidge,” he rasps, unable to keep the relief out of his voice.

The holographic pad rotates as she pulls it in front of her, and it allows Keith to see some more of the space, the vague suggestion of a battered hull stretching over their heads, a pile of snuffling bodies huddled nearby. He very carefully does not look at the pilot’s seat.

“How do you feel?” she asks. She looks pale in the glow, a long mottled bruise stark along her cheekbone. “Dizziness, headaches, confusion? Gaps in your memory?”

“I don’t—I don’t think so.”

“Great!” she chirps. “Then you won’t have any trouble explaining, in precise terms, how you found out about our extraction, and what your plans for us were. I say ‘were’, because whatever you think was gonna happen after getting us out of the city is absolutely, definitely not gonna happen.”

Keith isn’t sure if it’s a carryover from almost getting his brain fried out of his skull, but the words don’t make sense, no matter how many times he repeats them in his head.

Pidge huffs impatiently, resettles her weight. “Listen, I know you probably have some weird code about giving up information freely, but we’re gonna get it out of you whether you’re a willing participant or not, and it would really be a lot less painful for you if you just started cooperating now.”

“What are you talking about?” Keith demands.

“ _Don’t play dumb!_ ” Pidge snarls, startling him. Someone—Hunk, maybe—shifts in their sleep, but then Pidge has her hand shoved in front of Keith’s face, and he’s forced to refocus on it. When he does, his mouth goes dry. She’s holding a data chip. The pain in his neck suddenly makes sense. “I’ve been digging around this thing all night. Keith Kogane. Twenty-two years old. Born in Cactus, Texas. Two parents, no siblings.” There’s a pause, like she’s waiting for Keith to say something. “No mention of the Garrison.”

“Never said I was,” he tries. Pidge rolls her eyes at the lie—he had shown his hand thoroughly during their escape—so he changes tacks. “Fine. I had it altered. After the war.”

It had been a common occurrence in those awful months following the surrender, Garrison vets paying programmers to have their military histories erased. So Keith had been told.

“That’s what we assumed, at first,” she says, “but—no, that didn’t sit right with me. There should’ve been signs of tampering. The best fucking forger in the _Empire_ would have left something behind. But there’s nothing on this thing! Totally squeaky clean… I’ve been doing some thinking.” The expression on her face calcifies. “What does the name Keith Reese mean to you?”

Everything in Keith goes cold. Pidge’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Kogane isn’t a fake name, is it?” she asks. “It’s your real one.”

Keith can’t bring himself to answer, can’t dislodge the vice that’s suddenly clamped around his throat, but she isn’t looking for a response.

“Keith Reese was forged _on top of it_ , wasn’t it? And then, when you were done with it, they just popped it clean off.”

Keith swallows dryly. “How did you—”

“I guess I had a feeling,” she says, eyes down on the chip as she fiddles with it. “Back when Hunk first told us he had met a Garrison vet named Keith. But it’s not an uncommon name, and he made you sound like some crotchety old man. And of course he wouldn’t think—he wouldn’t have known... But then—you were the right age, and you could fly, and you called me—” Her voice breaks.

“I called you Matt,” he finishes for her, thinking back on those last blurry moments before his world had gone dark. He tries to chase that thought, follow it to some sort of conclusion, but the cogs in his brain are grinding together too haltingly, like there’s grit deep in the grooves.

“Anyway,” she says, her words barely a whisper over the storm. “I know who you are, is my point. So are you gonna stop playing stupid and tell me what you know, or are we gonna have to wait ‘til we’re back at base to zap it out of you?”

Everything is moving so sluggishly. These are memories that have been lying dormant for years, their neural pathways atrophied to the point of ruin. And he’s in no shape to be dragging them up into the sun.

“I’ve never tortured anyone for information before, but there’s a first time for everything, I suppose.”

When it hits him, it’s like a freight train.

“You’re Katie,” he blurts, and she flinches. “You’re Matt’s little sister.”

She doesn’t say anything, but the way she’s working her jaw is more than he needs as confirmation. A rush of grief—old and stale—swells up inside him, make his chest tight.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s embarrassing, really, how completely inadequate it is. A lifetime of apologies wouldn’t be enough to atone for the damage caused by his mistakes—his _arrogance_. He knows this, so there’s no reason to be as surprised as he is when Pidge reacts by grabbing two fistfuls of his shirt.

“Fuck you,” she grinds out, face white as a sheet, and her hands are trembling as they dig into his neck. “I don’t want a fucking apology. I want to know how you fuckers found out about the job. I want to know how you tricked Matt and Takashi Shirogane into going on that mission with you. I want _answers_.”

Keith gapes, and then understanding floods through him. Keith Reese, who was supposed to have died alongside Matt on that last fateful mission, shows up not only alive and well, but also right smack in the middle of Pidge’s operation, which, if successful, might actually have a chance of turning the entire Empire on its head. Not only that, but it turns out his identity had been completely fabricated.

“I’m not working for the Galra,” he says.

She sneers. “Really? You’re _really_ going to try that with me?”

“ _I’m not_.”

“And I’m supposed to just believe you,” she snaps.

“Break it,” Keith blurts out, thinking back on that day, sitting in Matt’s room, watching him work—

_(The first thing Matt had done after setting Keith up with his new identity was teach him how to remove it. How to jack into any port with a screen and use it to get rid of his shiny new name and age and hometown, and Keith had listened intently because he was going to be a soldier and that’s what soldiers did—they faced the truth, no matter how ugly._

_“This is just us being careful,” Matt had said. “It’s better to be prepared than not.”_

_It had still been scary, sitting there in the bunk room that smelled like teenager, the desk covered in textbooks and pilfered cafeteria food, Shiro sprawled across the bed but listening intently as though maybe he needed to know this information too, and that was somehow even more upsetting, imagining that scenario, and Matt—who Keith had barely known at that point—explaining the extraction procedure like it was a fucking recipe and not a survival plan in the event that everything went to utter shit, went to shit so badly that he’d have to wipe his history, hide it from the Galra for fear of persecution._

_“It’s pretty cool, actually,” Matt had said with a laugh, once Keith had gone through the motions, proved to him he could do it. “You’ve got the most fool proof contingency plan out of literally every single Garrison soldier in the world.”_

_Keith thought about that a lot in the following years. Less so at first, when things were good, and then with greater frequency as things began to unravel. As the Garrison kept losing ground. He had even more time to think about it on Mars, when the enormity of all he’d lost had still been so sharp and bright he could barely make himself eat most days, when he had felt the pull of those red and yawning canyons like a siren’s song. A wasteland of a planet, barren and dry and spinning uselessly on its orbit._

_He thought about it his first night in Santa Maria, as he sat crouched behind a grimy restaurant counter and connected himself to the cash register’s computer. He hid there for thirty minutes, clothes dripping rainwater all over the linoleum, his knuckles still full of TV screen shards, and erased Specialist Reese from existence—stripped it away until there was nothing left of his past but the bare bones, nothing to tie him to the last six years but a head full of rot and a knee that wouldn’t stop screaming, and there was nothing_ cool _about this, he thought, nothing to be grateful for or proud of—not even anything to be mad at, because it was all gone, everything was just fucking gone.)_

Pidge’s grip on him slackens slightly. “What? Break what?”

“The chip,” he says. “Break it open.”

“Why?”

Keith huffs an impatient breath. “Because I can prove the Galra didn’t make the forgery.”

Pidge slowly extricates herself from him, and then warily eyes the chip in her hand. She turns it over a few times, tests its flex, then gives him a dubious glance over the rims of her glasses. “It’s not going to shoot a cloud of poisonous gas into my face, is it? Trigger some sort of minor explosion? Send a distress signal out to your Galra buddies?”

He scowls.

“Right, the particle barrier would have fried its geolocating devices,” she says, then sighs heavily. “Well. Here goes nothing.”

She makes a fist. Keith hears a series of small pops, and when she uncurls her fingers, the chip is in pieces.

“It should be on the transistor panel,” Keith says.

She squints down at the chunks in her palm, poking through them with a finger, and Keith knows the moment she finds it, because her expression immediately goes stricken.

She looks up at Keith. Her eyes are shiny with unshed tears.

“You recognize it, don’t you?” he asks, suddenly breathless with the fact that this is a piece of his past that might not just exist in his head, that there is someone else who shares this knowledge, the memory of this person. “He drew that stupid little smiley face everywhere.”

“So… the Galra didn’t create Keith Reese,” she says. “Matt did.”

Keith nods.

“But.” Her nose scrunches up. “Why?”

“I wanted to enlist. Was too young.”

“And he just… made you a fake ID? You showed up at his door like some—some big-eyed, trigger-happy desert urchin, and he broke every military regulation out of what, the goodness of his heart?”

“My chocolate rations,” Keith says, throat like gravel, and Pidge lets out something halfway between a laugh and a sob, and the conversation falters long enough for Keith to seriously consider telling her the truth, the whole truth, but the words stick in his throat.

The whole truth is that Matt had done it because Shiro had asked him to, and Shiro had asked him to because Keith had begged. The whole truth is that Keith had been a selfish little shit, hung up on his talent, on proving himself. He hadn’t considered the consequences, and, in the end, destroyed everything.

“What the fuck happened to you, then?” she demands. “How did you survive? How’d you _get away?_ What the hell have you been doing these past three years? You know what,” she says, voice ramping up once more, whatever temporary relief Keith had eked out swiftly being swallowed up once more by her fury, “this still fucking reeks, man. This is all so shady! You have to see how—how _fucked up_ this is!”

“Of course I do,” Keith bites out. “It’s a fucking nightmare.”

“ _What happened_ ,” she says.

Keith’s stomach clenches. “The mission failed. Matt got killed, Shiro got taken, and I got sent to Mars. By the time I escaped, the war was fucking over, everyone had gone to ground. And Shiro—” A whine almost escapes. He clamps his mouth shut, then tries not to think too hard about the fact that he just said Shiro’s name out loud, _twice_.

“You’re a piece of shit, you know that?” Pidge says. “You three on that dinky little mission probably got closer to winning the war than any other battle or expedition or raid ever did, and you didn’t think that sort of information would have been helpful?”

“There was no point,” Keith says.

“What the hell do you mean, no point? I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but there are still people out here trying to put a stop to the Galra!”

“We _failed_.”

“That doesn’t mean every single attempt following is also going to fail! That’s the whole point of trying! Learning from your mistakes. I _know_ ,” she says, interrupting his attempt to protest, “I know this particular mistake was… I mean, I lost my goddamn brother. And then, you know, the Takashi guy got—” She chops at her neck and makes an awful, wet sound, “—and then, well, the Garrison sort of imploded—”

“Those missions had been _my idea_ ,” Keith says hoarsely, cutting her off, because she isn’t getting it. “Everything—all of that. It’s my fault.”

Pidge stares at him for a long time, long enough that he can’t stand the weight of her gaze anymore and has to look away.

“Keith,” she says, tone utterly calm—not warm, but he doesn’t hear any judgment or disgust or even pity in it either. “Matt didn’t just _do stuff_ , okay? If he forged you that ID, it wasn’t because of your kicked-puppy eyes, or chocolate rations or whatever. It was because he saw something in you worth taking a risk for. Hey, dude. Look at me.”

Keith drags his eyes up. When they meet hers, her face spasms with an emotion too fleeting to parse—disgust, or maybe impatience at his inability to handle any of this like a normal person. She schools it smooth. “We’ll deal with the other shit later, but I want to make this one thing abundantly clear. Matt would be so pissed if he found out you’d been feeling guilty this whole time, acting like he and Takashi Shirogane didn’t have any control over their own decisions. If Matt went on that mission with you,” she says, “it was because he knew it was a good plan. Because he knew it was the right thing to do. And you don’t get to take that away from him.”

Keith stares at her. He clenches his teeth so tightly they ache. Pidge sighs, a little crease forming between her brows, and then leans over to take off his ties. She stuffs the plastic bindings into her bag and scoops up her pad.

“Get some sleep,” is all she says before leaving to cuddle up with the others.

Keith slides down the wall until he’s curled up tight, and he lets himself pretend—just for a moment—that the rumbling against his back is the Antioch’s engine, that the cold metal beneath him is Erock’s floor, that the words bouncing around his head belong to the gladiator announcers and not Pidge.

It’s not that he believes what she said, but he can’t help thinking that _she_ believed it, and that’s—he doesn’t know what to do with that.

He lies there for a long time. Long enough for Pidge to settle down and for her breathing to even out. He lets out a shuddery sigh.

 _I really miss Shiro_ , he thinks, and then he shakes apart, over and over and over, as the storm pummels the ship from all sides.

He doesn’t sleep a wink.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> (I listened to [this song](https://soundcloud.com/brianparkhurst/the-black-paladins-i-will) on repeat while writing the chapter. It's the music from the fight scene in the Black Paladins episode, and it honestly makes me so freaking emotional.)

In the morning, Keith pretends to sleep while Pidge fumbles her way through convincing the others that he probably isn’t a Galran spy.

(“So… he drove straight through the particle barrier knowing it was gonna kill him?” Lance asks.

“Yes.”

“And you think that’s somehow _more_ plausible than him already knowing it wouldn’t kill him because he’s working for the Galra?”

“Um. Yes?”

“Pidge! You’re supposed to be the smart one here!”

“Is it really so strange?” Allura asks. “To sacrifice oneself for the greater good?”

Lance scoffs. “That is such a droid thing to say.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“It means you can’t turn people into numbers for a neat little equation. Humans don’t work that way. They don’t measure lives like that.”

“Some do,” Hunk says, fiercely. “We do.”

“We aren’t exactly paragons of mental health and stability, Hunk!”

“And _Keith_ is?” Pidge splutters.)

They let him keep his hands untied, but it’s not so much a group decision as the eventual realization that Pidge had already done so overnight, and the remainder of the morning is spent in fraught silence—Lance tight-lipped with fury, Pidge radiant with a mixture of indignation and guilt, Hunk hangdog because Keith’s presence is entirely his fault, and Allura at a bit of a loss about the whole thing. Keith, for his part, is so sleep-deprived and pain-dazed that he doesn’t have the energy to address his own confused emotions, stirred awake by Pidge and then left to simmer the rest of the night, let alone anybody else’s.

They gear up quickly, eager to get moving before the storm dies down. It takes both Allura and Hunk together to force the cargo door open, and when they finally manage it, hot wind and sand comes pouring in, stinging and spitting, staggering them.

They clamber out, first Pidge and Allura and then Keith. Lance’s chest is clearly bothering him, but all he does is glare when Keith offers a hand, so Keith leaves him to struggle by himself. Hunk probably would’ve helped, but he’s busy setting up a fuse in the ship’s fuel tank.

The wind outside is fierce. Keith makes sure his handkerchief is tucked down all the way around his collar, feels the back of his shirt crusted over with both new and dried blood. He follows it up to the jagged incision running across the back of his neck and then tugs the handkerchief higher, shudders at the crackling pain his touch ignites.

Nearly a foot of sand has been dumped in some places, and they wade through it like water. Galra patrols pass overhead intermittently, their arrival marked first by the low rumble of their engines in Keith’s chest and then the scattered beams of their searchlights dousing the landscape in hellish red. It all reminds Keith—viscerally—of Mars.

_(“Strip down and grab a suit,” barked the warden. He didn’t have to shout to be heard over the grinding generators, but he did anyway. His gold eyes glowed, two points of light in the dim holding cell. “Make it choppy.”_

_Keith eased himself out of his pants. They were already half-ruined, charred all over with a great bloody tear right above his knee. He bit his cheek against the wave of pain that pulsed out from his leg when it twisted._

_He started to tug his shirt up but froze halfway through the motion, the scent of Shiro hitting him—faint, but still there, pressed into the fibers of the shitty white tee. It was the only reason he hadn’t lost his mind on the long trip, pressed up on all sides by other prisoners-of-war too weak to fight, delirious from the booster shot, unable to do anything but sit and sweat as his leg stitched itself back together too quickly._

_“Keep moving, princess, we don’t have all day.”_

_The shirt was snatched up out of his grip, yanked over his head, and Keith came face-to-face with the warden. Keith snarled, almost lurched forward but then caught himself. All around the room, the guards had swung their guns up and were aiming them right at him._

_“Go ahead,” the warden sneered. “You wanna hit me? Hit me. It’ll be the last thing you ever do, but hey. It might feel nice.” When Keith didn’t move, he laughed and then shoved a surprisingly heavy suit—weighed down to offset Mars’ low gravity—into Keith’s chest. “Got a nose for surviving, huh? Don’t you worry. This place’ll knock that out of you right quick.”)_

They head northeast.

Soon, the Santa Ynez foothills appear out of the haze, hillocks of yellow and green rolling north to south, and as the group climbs up into them, the force of the storm subsides. They find a copse of gnarled trees to hide under until Hunk’s bomb detonates.

As they wait, Keith pulls down his handkerchief—a few lungfuls won’t do him any harm—and takes a deep breath of the open air. It’s gritty and bitter, but also fresh in a way that the city can never replicate.

“Suicidal idiot,” Lance mutters, and then scowls at Hunk’s look of disapproval. “What! He is!”

“Lance,” Pidge says.

“He’s huffing dust, he’s got _gunshot wounds_ and hasn’t asked any of us for like, basic medical treatment—”

“I’m fine,” Keith says, and then holds up his arm to show. It’s nowhere near healed up, but they had all seen Lance’s that morning when Hunk changed the dressings, the angry pink tendrils winding out, the way the skin has grown stiff and swollen. Keith’s, on the other hand, is scabbing over well, with no sign of infection.

“How the hell,” Lance says.

“I eat my vegetables,” Keith replies, maybe a little more flippantly than is fair, but it’s worth it for Lance’s sputtering indignation and Hunk’s surprised laugh.

Then a thunderous _boom_ shudders all around, making the branches above them rattle and shake, and a moment later, a great column of black smoke belches up out of the sandstorm.

It takes five minutes for every Galran patrol in the vicinity to descend upon the spot. Several of them come screaming out of the mountains, no doubt watching for attempts to pass through. When it seems that no more ships will be coming out to investigate the flaming cargo ship, they pack up and forge on ahead, eyes on the route and ears pricked for sounds of approaching ships.

Off to their right is a shallow leveled valley with a small river winding through it. Keith thinks that maybe, a long time ago, there had been a road. Following it would be exponentially easier than what they’re currently doing, which essentially consists of scrambling up a hill, sliding down the other side a few minutes later, and then starting the process all over again. But nobody suggests going down.

The clouds quickly burn away, leaving the sun to beat down with brutal intensity. It makes everything sharp and overexposed, the white stone blinding and the shadows all the more dark—the inverse of Keith’s nightmare but somehow just as unreal.

About an hour in, their caution pays off: they’re scrabbling down a slope covered in scree when Allura halts so suddenly she nearly bowls Pidge right over. But she doesn’t even seem to notice because she’s too busy spinning wildly around, obviously looking for somewhere to hide.

Keith waves, points to a small gulley he had seen a few yard back, and it’s a surreal minute of everybody going as quickly and quietly through the loose stones, a distance of ten feet that feels like a hundred, and then they’re all huddled together in the ditch, peeking out over the ridge just as a Galran soldier comes from around the faraway hill. They prowl along the low point between the surrounding rises, weapon canted causally in their grip, surveying the terrain with hawk-like intent.

Hunk’s breath stutters, which Keith only knows because their shoulders are wedged together, but he doesn’t make a sound. Nobody does; they all just sit and watch as the soldier moves along. Keith thinks he maybe sees another pair weaving their way through the hills across the valley.

When the soldier is gone, Lance climbs out of cover and creeps soundlessly back up the hill, then shimmies on his stomach until he’s near the top and able to peer over it. He stays like that for a long minute, then turns to start back down, but Allura makes a frantic abortive gesture and he freezes.

Two more Galran soldiers show up. Lance is tucked out of sight, but if they take a different route than their earlier comrade, he’ll be painfully exposed on the hillside. Keith squeezes his hands into painful fists, trembling with the effort to stay back.

Allura nods once the soldiers pass, and Lance gingerly picks his way back down to them. He all but throws himself back into the hideout, panting and trembling, tracks of sweat running through the dirt stuck on his face. He’s got a hand pressed tight against his ribs, and his breath is coming in tight bursts like he can’t fully expand his chest.

“Whole squadron. Down in the valley,” he gasps. “I heard them talking. More are coming in, and they’re gonna start combing the hills. They’ve got, like, really heavy artillery.”

“Jesus,” Pidge says, collapsing back against the sloped wall. “They’re moving way faster than I had expected.”

“Zarkon will do everything in his power to get me back,” Allura says. “My father—”

“Back?” Keith blurts out, and then whips his head to Pidge. “You _stole_ Allura?”

He isn’t sure who’s more surprised by the outburst—Pidge, or himself.

“Uh, yeah,” she says. “Why, what did you think we had done?”

“I… don’t know,” Keith says.

Lance snorts.

Keith scowls. “I thought—I mean, she was in a shipping container on the oldest operational cargo liner. I guess I thought your resistance group had coordinated it. Or some other branch had stolen her, hidden her on the Antioch, and you were just doing the extraction…”

He trails off, suddenly unsure, because every single expression on every single face has rapidly morphed into either pity or discomfort, and he doesn’t know what he did to cause it.

“Pal,” Lance says. “It’s just us. There is no resistance group.”

Keith waits for the punchline, for Pidge to roll her eyes or for Hunk to swat at him, but nobody reacts and Keith realizes it hadn’t been a joke.

“What,” he says.

“The Galra found Allura over a year ago,” Pidge says. “They tried to power her back up, but they weren’t able to. The Antioch was just temporary storage, kind of a hide-in-plain sight sort of deal. I guess you didn’t know this, but the ship had a whole secondary layer of security measures to keep people out of the lower storage areas.”

“How the hell did you manage that?” Keith demands. “You’re telling me the _three_ of you figured out all that on your own? Got onto the Antioch on your own?”

Pidge scowls. “Why are you so surprised? That’s exactly what you and Matt and Takashi did, isn’t it?”

“Whoa, wait,” Lance says, suddenly sounding much less breathless. “Takashi? As in, Takashi Shirogane? Pidge, what the hell, you couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?”

“I’m so sorry,” Pidge says, overly sweet. “Would you have believed me sooner if you had known you were in the presence of someone who knew your childhood hero?”

“ _No_ ,” Lance says, “but I could’ve been asking questions this whole time!” He turns to Keith, his eyes a little wild. “What’s Takashi Shirogane’s favorite color? Wait, no! Favorite food! Wait! Did he read books? He looked like the kind of guy who read like, really smart books—”

_(After the fourth wet sniffle, Keith flipped over in irritation to find Shiro leaking out of his eyes and nose, blotchy face twisted up in a halfway decent imitation of the puppy peering out from the book cover._

_“Shiro, you cannot seriously be reading another one of those dumb books.”_

_Shiro tried to frown at him, but his lower lip was wobbling too violently for it to land. “They’re not dumb.”_

_“It’s the same story over and over.”_

_“This one’s different.”_

_“Oh, lemme guess. This time, the dog’s missing a leg.”_

_“No,” Shiro wailed. “She’s_ blind _.”)_

“Anyway,” Pidge cuts in. “We only had to sneak onto one measly cargo barge. You guys got onto Zarkon’s _ship_.”

“That was—that was different, we…”

Pidge’s eyes go sharp, ravenous. “You what?”

Keith flaps his mouth a few times, then settles for a weak, “We had an inside guy.”

“Oh,” Pidge says. “That’s funny. So do we.”

“ _Pidge!_ ” Lance slaps her arm.

“Well, I don’t know if I’d say inside,” Hunk says.

“Formerly inside,” Pidge amends.

“Okay, enough!” Lance shouts, and then winces at how loudly he spoke. They all wait a second, but no golden-eyed droids come tearing back around the bend, so he continues in a softer voice. “We gotta keep moving.”

“Where are we going, exactly?” Allura asks, which surprises Keith. He had assumed she’d been filled in sometime between taking the chip out of his head and going to sleep.

“I think, in light of recent developments,” Pidge says carefully, “it would be best if you knew as little as possible. Just in case.”

Allura looks ready to argue, but then her shoulders sag. “Right,” she says. “Just in case you’re killed and I’m taken by the Galra. Again.”

“Right,” Pidge says, looking a little ill.

They travel more cautiously after that. Hunk and Lance get sent ahead to scout the route, and though Keith is glad for the distance between himself and Lance, he can’t help thinking it’s a waste of Allura’s heightened senses and Keith’s past experience. But Keith’s on thin ice as is, and Allura’s being handled with a strange combination of unease and awe, and so the two of them are delegated to the middle of the pack, watched at from behind by Pidge.

Slowly but surely, as they keep climbing higher, the landscape shifts from dried-out brown to faded green. The grass and trees are on their very last legs before the cold weather sweeps in and kills it all. Some leaves have already begun to fall, and they crunch softly underfoot, skitter along the ground.

Keith starts noticing a few old trails winding through the mountains, long-abandoned but no doubt leading to the crumbled remains of old cabins and farmsteads. He wonders if there’s a lake nearby—if maybe that’s where they’re heading—and then stops wondering when the breeze grows cool and fresh, the way it does when it comes off of water.

No other Galran patrols appear—not on foot or in the sky. Keith thinks he should be glad about this but finds himself instead growing more and more apprehensive, tension creeping into his limbs like live wires. It doesn’t help his headache in the least, and by the time Pidge calls a break, he’s just about ready to snap in two.

“But we’re almost there,” Lance protests, even as Hunk shoves him down onto a cracked-open boulder.

“You’re bleeding through your dressing,” Pidge says. “It’s unhygienic and also gross.”

Lance grumbles but allows Hunk to pull up his shirt and peel off the stained bandages, while Pidge kneels down and gets out new ones.

Keith takes himself away from the quiet scene, over to a gap in the trees that looks like it might have been a driveway at some point, if the nearby remains of a metal mailbox are anything to go by. He lowers himself onto a ragged log that’s fallen down, closes his eyes against the spiderweb headache at the back of his skull. The air is thin up here, makes his mouth tacky.

“May I sit with you?”

Keith looks up to find Allura standing in front of him. She’s holding a canteen of water.

“Sure.".

She sits down beside him and then holds up the water. “Hunk gave this to me. But I don’t—it was very nice of him, but—”

“They’re a little clueless when it comes to droids,” Keith says.

Allura lets out a relieved laugh. “Yes, they are." She lifts the water a little higher. Keith realizes with a jolt that she’d been offering it to him.

His first sip is small, just enough to swirl around. It tastes like dirt and blood, but he swallows it anyway, and the next two mouthfuls go down more smoothly. He tries to remember the last time he drank anything and finds he can’t.

“Thanks,” he says, then caps it back up. Three measly sips of water and he already feels that much less like overdone jerky. He looks over to the humans. In the following quiet, he can just barely catch their voices.

“—think we should tell them before he gets here—”

“Tell them what? ‘Oh, hey, fair warning, we’ve been working with—’”

“Well they’re going to find out soon enough!”

“I’m sorry,” Keith finds himself saying. “About Coran.”

“Thank you,” she says softly.

“And them,” he adds, nodding towards the three.

Allura looks surprised for a moment, like she hadn’t expected him to notice—or, more likely, care about—the way they’ve been treating her. Then her expression goes rueful. “I must admit, this… is not the world I fell asleep to. When I—” She cuts herself off with a shaky breath. “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. All that matters now is making sure the Galra never find me again.”

The urge to press Allura for information comes on fierce and takes Keith by surprise. He tamps it down, hard.

 _(Keith let out a groan of frustration and dropped his forehead onto the desk. “This doesn’t make_ sense _.”_

_“Which part?” Matt asked dully from his nest of blankets. Shiro, beside him, was squinting his way through a pile of water-stained papers. He looked pale, pinched, though Keith was hard pressed to find, in recent memory, a time that he hadn’t. “The inscrutable mathematics, the mind-bendingly complex ciphers, the—”_

_“The Alteans,” Keith cut in. “These—droids called Alteans.” He threw himself up to pace and nearly knocked Shiro’s clock off the desk in the process. God, it was late. Early. Whatever. “I’ve been through every single edition of the Android Model Index, and the only thing any of them say is that Alteans had been designed to help with ship repairs. That’s it.”_

_“But we know the Galra are interested in them,” Shiro said._

_“Yeah,” Keith said. “None of their communications mention_ why _, though.”_

_“Well, when were they decommissioned?” Matt asked._

_“No idea,” Keith said._

_The mattress springs squeaked in protest as Matt jackknifed upright, jostling Shiro and sending the papers on his chest slipping to the floor. “What do you mean?” he said, completely oblivious to Shiro’s black look. “Does it not say?”_

_“Is that… not normal?”_

_Matt’s eyes bulged. “Uh, yeah! Super not normal! When the last of an android model dies or is shut down, whoever’s there to facilitate it send a notification to the registry, and they update the index. The fact that it isn’t included—”_

_“They might still be alive,” Shiro said._

_“Or they were all killed,” Keith said. “And no one reported it.”_

_“But_ why _?” Matt demanded, and then before anyone could answer, he launched himself over Shiro’s legs and hurried to the corner of the room where they had put all the hard copies of the communications he had managed to decode._

_“I’ve been through all those,” Keith sighed, suddenly exhausted. He dropped back into the desk chair and then ran a hand along his head, tugged at the longer hairs. “There’s nothing.”_

_Matt completely ignored him. “This feels important,” he muttered. “This feels like an actual lead.”_

_“To where, though?” Keith asked._

_Matt made a noise of frustration. “I don’t know.”_

_There was a long pause. Keith eventually looked to Shiro, already knowing what he’d see there: a hard, hungry glint in his eyes, one that used to send a thrill through Keith but now just made him feel sick._

_“We need to go back,” Shiro said. “We need more information.”_

_Keith should’ve said something. He should’ve begged off a few weeks, argued that someone would start to notice if they kept slipping away so often, or maybe pretended he was feeling queasy after going into the hot zone so often—but neither of those things were true and Shiro knew it._

_So he said, “Okay,” and if Shiro noticed his hesitation, he didn’t say anything about it.)_

He sighs, presses a fist into his pounding temple. “I’d say something to them. But I think it would do more harm than good.”

Allura’s fingers brush against his chin, guide his head back up. He’s got nowhere to look but her eyes. “Your head is bothering you.”

Keith is about to deny it, but the words die in his throat because all of a sudden cool relief is spreading out from the back of his neck, chasing away the ache until nothing’s left but a sated hum.

“There,” she declares. “That should feel better.”

He doesn’t know what his face is doing, but whatever it is causes Allura to laugh, warm and pleased.

“How…” he starts.

“It’s what I was made for,” Allura replies, and it’s without any of the bitterness that so many of the droids Keith knows carry. “Alteans were designed to redirect and displace energy streams. To take power from one source and transfer it to another.”

Keith knew this. Had surmised as much back when he had been at the Garrison, had seen it confirmed last night with the nuclear core and the cargo ship bursting back to life. But _this_ , the ability to manipulate currents in human bodies—

The Galra have a way to siphon human energy, he realizes. It’s Alteans.

“What’s strange, though,” Allura continues, completely oblivious to his spinning thoughts, “is that I’ve aided humans before but have never felt anything like you. Like there was something different, or something more…”

She trails off and then her eyes harden, hone into Keith and pin him down. A sheet of ice runs down his entire spine, leaves a cold pool of nausea in his gut.

“Someone’s here,” she whispers, and Keith has only a moment to process the words, to realize what’s going on before two gunshots crack through the hills like a breaking storm, one right after the other.

Allura throws herself onto Keith the very same moment a fist-sized hole bursts open in her chest, showering him in wires and gears, then they’re both tumbling backwards off the log, and it’s the only reason the second shot doesn’t go straight through his head.

“Get down!” he hears Pidge scream, but it’s just background noise, it’s static in his brain, because Allura is stiff in his arms and her eyes are glazed and the lights beneath them have gone out—

“No, no, no,” he says, and his voice trembles like he’s fucking six years old, but he can’t help it, Allura had been smiling and laughing and _fixing him_ just moments ago, and now—and now. He presses a hand against the side of her face. It’s cold. Droids run cool, but she’s really cold, the type that means nothing’s working anymore because it’s all shut off for good. His breath hitches, and it doesn’t come unstuck.

His hands drift down to the tangle of fizzing circuitry spilling out of her chest. He stuffs everything back in as best he can. Sparks catch on his fingers like small bursts of sunlight. He feels her—not just her parts, but her broken currents and her heart, a lonely melancholy that makes him feel hollow, and he knows he’d never live with himself if he didn’t try, promise or no promise, and so he screws his eyes shut and holds her tight and thinks, as hard as he can, _wake up_.

_(“Don’t you ever do this again,” his dad was saying, and Keith was trying not to cry, trying to be strong, but he didn’t understand what he had done wrong and it was making his throat tight and his eyes hot. “You hear me?”_

_Keith looked at the watch in his dad’s hand. It had been in the trash this morning but Keith had fished it out and it was working now, and he thought he had done a good job._

_“Keith. Do you hear me,” and Keith told him yes, and he then asked, “You done this to anything else?” so Keith had to show him the toys under the porch, and he made Keith break every single one and the watch last, and then Keith really did start crying._

_When it was done, all the scraps of metal and plastic piled into the trash, he cupped Keith’s face and looked him in the eye and said, “No good’ll ever come from you fixin’ things meant to be broke.”)_

Something drains from Keith, passes from the pads of his fingers into Allura’s skin. He doesn’t know what it is. He can only chase a foggy memory of holding onto busted toys and asking them to work again, but he knows the feeling when it comes, knows it like breathing and like flying, and he watches with his heart thrumming in his throat as the marks beneath Allura’s eyes flicker on and off and then settle to soft, steady pink.

Keith’s breath whooshes out of him, leaves him weak with relief. He doesn’t have time to stay still, though, not when there are Galra pinning them down. He looks over to the outcropping of rocks where the others had been siting and finds them huddled down behind them. They’re hunched over something on the ground, and Keith has a moment to wonder what it is before Pidge takes it in her hand and heaves it through the air.

It’s fist-sized, dull gray, and that’s all Keith sees of it before it hits the ground, over where the shots had come from, and explodes with force. Shards of wood and stone go flying, but more importantly, a massive dust cloud kicks up.

Keith scrambles to his feet. He’s shaky, covered in cold sweat, but there’s also a metric ton of adrenaline spiking through his veins, and so when he hoists Allura over his shoulders she feels no heavier than a Garrison survival pack.

He takes off at a run, down the broken driveway, deeper into the forest, his breath and steps and pulse pound along to the refrain driving through his head: _hold on, hold on, hold on..._


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I have to apologize to people who have been reading real-time. I went back and edited the interrogation scene with Haxus (Ch 2) because in this long span between updates, I actually plotted out this monster of a fic, and parts of that conversation didn't work anymore. I am super sorry, and I don't plan on it happening again.
> 
> This really doesn't affect much and I'll post a more detailed explanation at the end of this chapter, but the most important part is that humans and droids aren't supposed to be able to make babies together. So Keith, being a human/droid hybrid, is pretty significant. I never explicitly said it WAS possible, but I think by omission it was probably assumed? Idk.
> 
> Also - this was a long time between chapters, which hopefully doesn't happen again but I do want to say that I'm gonna finish this thing come hell or high water so don't worry about this being abandoned. And thank you for all your kind words and kudos, they very much help :)
> 
>  **TW: mentions of sexual assault.** During one of Keith's flashbacks, the threat of sexual violence is used as a scare tactic. The flashback in question occurs after the paragraph that begins with "Keith throws himself forward and bowls them over." Please proceed with caution if you think you might need to; I have a little summary in the end notes if you want to catch up.

Allura’s life force fizzes through Keith as he runs, burning where they touch: her cheek against his arm, his hand at her wrist. He can feel her circuitry trying to stitch itself back together, can feel the charges failing to complete. It’s difficult, he figures, to repair things that are currently in pieces fifty yards back.

At the end of the road sits a small field peppered with wind-warped trees, and a tin can cabin right smack in the middle of it. Keith hustles through scrub grown past his hips, whispering grass and sagebrush overrun with yellow petals, listens to the  _rat-tat-tat_  of photon guns discharging somewhere behind him.

He jerks to a stop twenty yards from the porch steps, eyes catching on a squat metal box sitting far to his right. A moment later he finds the other one to his left, and even though they clearly aren’t working anymore—would be producing a trembling line straight across his path if they had been—a shiver of recognition falls down his spine.

_(He stood leaned up against the pickup, turned from the sun so his eyes were nothing but black pits. Sweat dripped streaks of dirt down his arms. Storm cells were full of less thunder._

_Keith came to a halt before him._

_“I’ve been waitin’ here four hours.”_

_“Sorry.” The word bobbled halfway through, got tripped up on the hard thump of his heart. He’d run all the way home, had sprinted a whole mile after seeing the truck’s ruby glint on the horizon._

_His dad shoved off the truck. “_ Four goddamn hours _, Keith, thinkin’ you’d maybe been snagged, or killed, or you’d just fell and hit your head and you’ve been lyin’ dead in the house for a whole month. And I wouldn’t even be able to get in there until I found a droid dumb enough to drive three hours into the middle of the fucking desert with me and let me into my own goddamn house.”_

_Keith inched towards the property boundary, close enough to feel its current skimming across his calves, but a grease-black finger looped through the hole in his shirt and held him still._

_The eyebrows drove further down. “Hell’s this from?”_

_“Don’t know.” Except he did: he and Takashi had found a ravine last week, and he’d gotten snagged on one of the busted-up rocks on the way down._

_“Four hours,” his dad said again, but this time he just sounded tired. He gave Keith a little shake. “Jesus, kid, you gonna leave me, too? I gotta start worryin’ about you, too?”_

_“Sorry,” Keith whispered again, nowhere near able to tell his dad he wasn’t the only one who worried about getting left behind, that, between the two of them, Keith was the liability: the one who was more trouble than he was worth, the reason they had to live the way they did—instead just tugged his dad across the bio scanner, towards the house.)_

He steps past the defunct scanners, tries not to think hard about it, swears he feels a phantom itch of the energy field anyway. He hurries up the porch steps, takes note of the sprung booby traps overhead and underfoot.

The entire structure groans beneath his weight. The kick he delivers to the front door is way too forceful—the aluminum caves in like a sheet of paper.

The interior of the cabin is a mess. All the windows have all fallen out. Bird nests sit wedged in every possible crevice, mammal bones picked dry and scattered across the floor. Keith lowers Allura on the cleanest patch he can find—which isn’t saying much—and then, because now he’s got an idea of who might’ve lived in this house, goes over to the double bed wedged in the far corner.

He grabs onto a bedpost and drags it, and it’s either very light or Keith’s losing control of his muscles because the whole thing goes skittering across the floor so quickly he almost clips himself with it.

And there in the floor, a little warped and rusted but certainly serviceable, is a cellar door.

_(His dad had been gone six months. Six whole months, and Keith had to finally concede that if he’d been planning on coming back, he would’ve by now. So the next time Takashi came around, Keith showed him the basement._

_“What’s it for?” Takashi asked, breathless with wonder, his whole side pressed up against Keith’s as they squeezed under the bed together, peered down into the open hatch.)_

Someone comes pounding up the stairs. Keith spins around to find Lance racing through the doorway. “Keith! What’re you—” he starts, and then trips over Allura.

Keith frowns down at him. “Where are Hunk and Pidge?”

“Ungh,” Lance groans. He pulls his head up, spits out a mouthful of grass. “They were behind me like, two seconds ago.”

Keith stares out the door at the field, at the road beyond. It’s all empty. He realizes everything’s gone silent; the firing has stopped. He tries not to jump to conclusions, forcibly redirects his thoughts to the hatch door. He finds the handle, starts digging debris away.

Lance crawls forward to peer over his shoulder. “Oh, hey, nice. A little hidey hole. How the hell did you find this?”

_(Keith shrugged, surprised by how hard it was to lie. “Dunno. My dad doesn’t like talking about it.”)_

Keith doesn’t reply.

Lance sighs, then notices Allura. “Oh my god. Why is everyone getting shot?” He starts shoving her, trying to get her onto her side.

“Don’t touch her,” Keith barks.

“But there’s leaves and shit in there!”

Keith can see that, but Lance digging his hands around in there isn’t going to do any good, and every time she jostles even just the smallest bit, a surge of worry rips through him fiercely enough to make his stomach queasy. Her head is hanging limply, rolling and bouncing every time Lance touches her.

“Leave it.”

“Are you kidding me? Why—”

Keith slams his fist down on the hatch, hard enough to dent it. “Don’t fucking  _touch her_.”

Wide-eyed, Lance pulls his hand away.

Keith is suddenly uproariously angry. At Lance for wasting time, at Hunk and Pidge for falling behind, but mostly at himself. For putting that look on people’s faces, for scraping up against everyone’s edges.

He grabs the handle. He gives it a hearty twist, but it doesn’t move. He tries a few more times. Nothing gives.

“Rust?” Lance guesses.

Keith frowns. “I think it’s locked.”

“I don’t see a lock.”

“It feels locked.”

Lance’s eyebrows shoot up. “It… feels locked.”

“Shut up.” Keith gives the handle one last vicious tug, and the entire thing breaks off in his hand.

“Nice,” Lance drawls.

Keith gives up on the handle. He leans forward to examine the hinges, which have rusted far more than the rest of the door—perhaps made from a weaker metal. He digs his fingers beneath the door on either side of them and gives it a good tug.

The hinges snap apart with two loud  _cracks_. Keith topples backwards, and the door falls with a riotous clang of metal.

“ _Really nice,”_ Lance hisses.

Keith’s got his mouth open to respond, but just then he hears muffled shouts coming from nearby. And they aren’t Hunk and Pidge.

Lance drags Allura out of sight from the front door while Keith shoves the hatch door to the side. He peers into the opening; down below is nothing but murky gray. Maybe the faintest hint of a cement floor, and a rotted pile of what Keith assumes had once been stairs.

“You first,” Keith says.

Lance is pale. He’s already bled through his new bandages, and it’s now seeping across his undershirt. He looks very young. “But Hunk and Pidge—”

Keith tries to shove him in, but Lance braces himself against the wall. He growls low in his throat. “We don’t have time—”

“We can’t just leave them!”

“Allura’s the priority.”

Lance looks, for a moment, outraged that there is a reality where the life of a droid came above those of his friends, but he clenches his jaw and nods once, jerkily, before clambering into the cellar.

Keith lowers Allura down. There’s a breathless moment where he has to let go before Lance has hands on her, but Lance catches her well enough, if a little heavy on the labored gasps and groans.

“ _Jesus_ , she’s dense,” he rasps, staggering to keep under her armpits. “What the hell’s she made of, plutonium?”

Keith gets up and heads to the bed, which he had managed to fling halfway across the room.

“Hey, what the fuck!  _Dude!”_  Lance yelps.

Keith leans back over and hopes his expression is appropriately scathing. “I’m getting the bed. To cover up the door.”

Lance’s mouth freezes on a silent  _oh_ , and then he waves his hand around. “Well, get on with it, then! Chop, chop.”

Keith gets on with it, but he does it slowly just to piss Lance off, and it’s the only reason he notices the two Galran soldiers in the field.

He doesn’t think; he just moves. He’s out the back window between one moment and the next, and he lands straight on the shattered remains of the busted windowpane. The glass crunches audibly beneath his boots, draws beads of blood from his palms.

The footsteps halt. Keith holds his breath. A long, silent moment passes, and then the Galrans resume walking, this time slower. It takes a few seconds for Keith to realize one of them has peeled off, probably to loop around the house. He hears the creaking of a foot coming down on the porch steps.

Keith grabs a wedge of broken glass and skirts around the far side of the cabin, trying to move silently but not sure if he’s managing it. The muscle memory is there, but his gait is different now. It’s stiff and uneven, and his heart is pounding so loudly in his ears it’s drowning out all other sound.

He peers around the corner as the soldier is still crossing the porch. The moment they disappear through the door, Keith moves—through the grass, then up the stairs, and while it’s impossible to keep those steps quiet, he takes care to match them with the soldier’s.

They’re heading straight for the cellar opening. Keith’s grip on the glass tightens. The soldier leans over the lip of the hatch and Keith swings forward.

Galran chips are all in the same place: nape of the neck. That’s why everyone else’s is there as well. Galran chips are deep, though, protected by layers and layers of hardware. Keith learned long ago the exact point of entry required to slip between the outer plates, learned how to twist at just the right spot to force the point of a blade straight into the chip.

Keith got very good at killing droids during his time with the Garrison.

The shard goes in easy enough, but when he tries to change the angle, dig sideways between ropes of metal sinew, the point of the glass stops up against something hard. And instead of dying instantly, the Galran just lets out a little grunt. Keith staggers back in surprise. There is a thick smear of blood across the soldier’s neck, which doesn’t make sense until Keith realizes it’s his own dripping off the glass still wedged into the synthetic skin.

A round of gunfire comes ripping through the house, punching straight through the walls and sending Keith skittering. The soldier doesn’t waste a second in stalking back over to the hatch door and firing down into the cellar, not even looking to see if anyone’s there.

Keith throws himself forward and bowls them over. They go down together and land halfway on top of the open cellar door. It’s a breathless few moments of thrashing, each trying desperately to gain the upper hand. Keith’s knee gets clipped, hard enough to twist it, and the pain from it makes his vision gray out. The Galran gets over him and he’s suddenly stuck on his stomach, and then there’s a hand fisted in his hair and his face is being slammed into the frame of the hatch, over and over and over.

_(Droid knees felt like human knees, that was the first thing that Keith thought, and the second one, when the fingers went around his throat, was this: droid hands felt like human hands. But the glowing eyes were not human. The predator’s smile even less so. Keith scrabbled, but there was nothing on the cell’s metal floor for his heels to catch on._

_The pressure building in his head was incredible. The Galran grinned. “Look at all that red in your cheeks.” His fingers tightened, and Keith’s breath came out a high whistle. “Can’t wait to see it painted across the gladiator ring.”_

_“Easy, Drarnax,” his buddy said. “Sendak said—”_

_“I know what Sendak said. The kid’ll still be able to fight.” The other hand went into Keith’s hair, fisted in tight. “I’m not gonna do anything that’ll leave a mark.”_

_A surge of cold panic shot through Keith. He bucked up as hard as he could, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Drarnax was bigger and healthier and_ angrier _, and he cracked Keith across the cheek like he was swatting a fly. The force of the blow sent the ground pitching._

 _“It’s gonna be a full surrender, now that we have Shirogane’s kid,” Drarnax said over the uproar in Keith’s head, and Keith had to swallow down a laugh. “This whole thing is gonna end with fucking handshakes and signatures on a line. It’s_ wrong _. You humans were fucking us over for_ decades _before anyone ever drew a weapon. You treated us like animals. You came into our homes.”_

_Drarnax wasn’t smiling anymore. His face was twisted up with rage and grief. It was very human, Keith thought, and then Drarnax yanked his head up, crushed their mouths together hard enough to draw blood. Keith bit down. Drarnax slapped him again, harder this time, and everything went liquid._

_Keith came to on his stomach with a hand digging beneath his waistband, razing a path across his skin. He tried wriggling free but there was nowhere to go, nothing but punishing weight pressing in from all sides. A hard sob punched out of him, and Drarnax slowed down._

_There was a mouth at his ear. No warm breath, no rustle of air. Just the faintest brush of blood-wet lips._

_“Oh, I’m not gonna do it,” Drarnax whispered. He ground his fingers into Keith’s hip, deep enough to find bone. Keith screwed his eyes shut. “I could. I_ want  _to. But I won’t. I want you to know that a droid gave you more mercy, more_ humanity _, than you fuckers ever gave us. I want you to think about that for the rest of your pathetic life.”_

_And then he was off, gone like he had never been there at all, except for all the places on Keith that were throbbing and burning, except for the way his heart was pounding so fast he felt sick. And all he could think was that at least it would be over soon. At least he wouldn’t have to feel this way for much longer. It was the first time since their capture he had let himself think it. It didn’t hurt as much as he had expected it to.)_

The sharp report of a gunshot cuts through the static. The soldier on top of Keith lurches backwards, gets thrown right off.

Keith looks down into the cell and sees a very sweaty Lance gripping a small pistol like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. He stretches his hand out. After just a second, Lance lobs the gun up. Keith snatches it out of the air, spins around, already seeking the neck.

“Keith!” Lance shouts. “Wait!  _Don’t kill_ —”

Keith puts three plasma bullets into the Galran’s throat. The other one peeks through the cabin’s back window a moment later. Keith kills that one too. They go down with a clumsy clatter, disappear from view just as suddenly as they had appeared.

Lance lets out a small scream of frustration. “What did I just  _say_ , you  _idiot_ —”

Keith gets up. He grabs the bed. He tries to tell himself it’s anger that’s making his hands shake.

“Keith, hey, you need to find something to pull us out of here, like ASAP, because we are about to be under some serious—”

Keith drags the bed over the cellar door. And then he unstraps the gun from the Galran slumped against the dresser. Their face is hidden behind their helmet.

“Uh, hello? Are you listening? What’s going on up there?”

He crawls under the bed and slides the door over the hatch as much as he can, falls into the dark below. He doesn’t land well. His bad leg crumples, and the gun somehow ends up wedged beneath him.

He tugs it out with a grunt, flops onto his back, looks up into Lance’s murderous face.

“You—you—” Lance says, and then has to walk away to compose himself. Keith takes the opportunity to prod at his face. It’s wet and sticky and already beginning to swell. Lance reappears, this time with a little white box in his hand. “I said  _don’t kill them_. And what do you do? You kill them!”

Keith runs his tongue over blood-slick teeth. “Thought you didn’t like droids.”

“I don’t, wise-ass, but those guys are hooked up to their suits and each other with whatever Galran mumbo-jumbo they have. Every single dickhead in that squad just got an alert that their buddies just died, with a nice little map showing them exactly where. So, great going, this place is gonna be swarming with Galra in like five minutes.” He swings something small and white up to Keith’s face. Keith flinches. Lance freezes.

“Don’t touch me,” Keith says.

Lance scowls. “It’s just gauze.”

He tries again. Keith bats his hand away. Lance purses his lips together and then surges onto his feet. “Right! Of course! What was I  _thinking_  trying to help?” He chucks the box at Keith’s chest and stomps away. “Go septic, see if I care.”

“Take the gun,” Keith says. He doesn’t look, but he hears Lance’s footsteps pause just long enough to bend down and scoop the Galran gun off the floor.

Keith stares at the white box. There’s a small red cross on the front, and when he pops it open, he finds a small cache of first aid supplies—and not just for a human. There is a multipurpose screwdriver inside, tweezers and spare wires and plugs, and several packets of lubricant. A small flashlight that, against all odds, flickers to life.

Keith tucks the pistol into his waistband and then brings the kit over to where Allura has been sprawled gracelessly on the floor, right beside an old checkered couch. The lights on her cheeks are wobbling off and on, like she’s barely holding onto whatever surge of energy he had given her.

He kneels down and presses the back of his hand to her forehead, an instinctive gesture that he realizes too late doesn’t really mean much on droids. He’s surprised when her life force hits him, far stronger than it had been just minutes ago. With it comes an unexpected pulse of raw energy.

Keith had been taught about ocean systems at the Garrison: how wind-driven currents travel poleward from the equator, how they cool along the way and eventually sink. How the dense, cold water flows into ocean basins and can take as long as one thousand years to return to the surface.

This is what Keith feels when he touches Allura: an alien, pulsing grief, forced down deep. He jerks his hand away.

The flashlight isn’t powerful, but it’s bright enough to illuminate her wound. The shot hit her in the middle of her chest—right where her breastbone would be if she had one. Keith tries to use the tweezers to tug out the roots and weeds, but his hands still aren’t doing what he wants them to.

He gives up for the time being and instead walks the cellar. It’s not as big as he had originally assumed: just enough space for a couch, kitchenette, and double bed in the corner. There’s a radio on the coffee table, an old one that reminds Keith of Erock. He avoids looking at it, focuses instead on looking for clues about the people who had once lived here. The lack of a bathroom is interesting. As is the wall-mounted rack of dusty firearms.

“ _Jump down the hole,”_  Lance mutters from the other side of the cellar, warping his voice into what is apparently his approximation of Keith’s.  _“Protect the droid._  Yeah, well, now we’re stuck in a moldy pit with a horde of bloodthirsty Galrans on their way, and Hunk and Pidge are out there somewhere. Great plan. I’m shocked, truly I am, that Zarkon managed to catch you guys that first time, with a brain like yours on the team.” Something clatters, and Lance swears colorfully.

“Keep quiet,” Keith says.

“ _Keep quiet_ ,” Lance mimics.

Keith bites down a snarl. “They would’ve caught us if we ran.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You’re bleeding out, and Allura’s dead weight.”

“Oh, ‘cause  _you’re_  currently the model of health and fitness.”

“We’re slow.”

“You know what’s worse than slow? Completely motionless.”

Keith turns away. This is a waste of time. He wonders, briefly, if maybe Lance subsists on inane bickering.

“Right, okay, you do your prowling over there, and I’ll look for a way out of this literal hole you’ve dug us into over here, and you can feel free to help anytime.”

The eastern wall—the one facing the lake—is bare, save for two photographs hanging on it. They both feature the same two people: a man and a woman, sun-browned and crinkly-eyed. In one, they’re standing on a cliff with their arms chucked around each other. In the second, they’re at a bar. His face is burrowed in her neck and they’re laughing, beer-warm.

Keith’s chest clenches when he sees it: the markings on the woman’s forehead, the discoloration ringing her eyes.

_(“Your mom hated surprises,” his dad would always say—after he tucked Keith in, but before he turned the light out. He’d sit at the end of Keith’s bed and smile so wide his face went all crinkly.)_

“Whoa,” Lance says from over his shoulder. Keith barely manages to keep from jumping three feet, but Lance is too distracted to notice. “Is that… is that a droid? You know, I’ve always wondered how that works? Physically, I mean. Aren’t droids like, a hundred percent metal?”

_(“Except for you, squirt. The biggest and best surprise we ever got.”)_

Keith tries to wedge a finger behind the picture frame, tug it away from the wall, but it doesn’t budge. It’s welded in place. His heartbeat stutters. “You wanna know what this basement’s for?”

“Um. Isn’t it a fallout shelter?”

Keith steps over to the other picture frame. It’s stuck to the wall as well. “That’s an Olkarian droid. They weren’t commissioned ‘til after the nuclear war.” He presses his hand against the glass, but nothing happens, and the frames are too far away for him to touch at the same time.

“So...?”

Keith turns to face Lance. “So I want you to think, for a second, about why a droid and human living together in the decades before the Tech War might have a hidden basement door under their bed. Go press your hand against that picture frame.”

Lance acquiesces without any complaint, too busy mulling over the puzzle to put up any sort of fight. It’s just as well, because even with both of them touching the scanners, nothing happens. Which probably means they’re busted. Which also means they’re fucked.

For all of Lance’s posturing, Keith knows—well, hopes—there’s some substance beneath the bluster. He at the very least trusts that Pidge wouldn’t allow a complete idiot on this job, with so much on the line. And, after a few moments of hard frowning, Lance’s expression clears.

“It’s an escape route,” he breathes. “That’s why the door was locked from the inside!  _Dude!”_  He smacks Keith on the chest. Keith tries to broadcast his displeasure, but Lance is too caught up in his excitement to notice. “Why didn’t you say that earlier? Here I was going on and on about you dooming us to a super grim death, and you had a halfway decent plan hidden up your sleeve the whole time! We really need to work on your communication skills, man. As in, create some. Because you currently have zero.”

Keith fiddles with a chink in the wall paint.

“Unless,” Lance says, after a long pause, “you weren’t actually sure there was a way out of here ‘til you found these fake picture frames, which I’m starting to think is the case because of that guilty look on your face,  _annnd_  I’m sliding back into being mad at you.”

He shoves Keith hard. Keith catches himself on the wall, spins around with a growl. “What the hell was that for?”

“For being a tight-lipped asshole. Also, for killing those Galrans when I told you not to. ‘Cause unless we figure out how to open the magic door in the wall, we’re still dead.”

The admonishment is all the more grating for being true. “The hatch can be a bottleneck,” Keith says, just to be difficult.

Lance scoffs. “Until they toss a bomb down and  _blow us up_.”

“They won’t. They need Allura alive.”

“Right, that’s why they blasted a hole through her chest.”

“They didn’t,” Keith says, vehement. “The shot was meant for me. She moved in front of it.”

This gives Lance pause. “Did she really?” He sounds almost impressed. It pisses Keith off.

“Why are you so surprised?”

“Why are you so  _defensive?_ ” Lance snaps back. “You got a crush on her, is that it?”

“No! You’ve all just been huge dicks to her ever since you found her.”

Lance has the fucking gall to look surprised. “No we haven’t,” he splutters, and his eyes bug out even further when Keith makes a derisive noise. “She’s a  _droid_ , man! It’s not like she has actual feelings!”

“Of course she has feelings!”

“She has  _algorithms_. Computer codes!”

“Whoever taught you that,” Keith says, “is a fucking idiot.”

It’s a pressure point. Lance’s face immediately goes beet-red. “Well, at least I’m not the one drooling over a glorified microwave!”

It’s lazy. Lance really could have done better. Keith punches him anyway.

He feels the crunch of cartilage beneath his knuckles, hears Lance’s breath go thick and bloody. He only has a moment of satisfaction before he’s being bowled over.

They land on a pile of something that shatters loudly, and then they’re rolling around on the floor, grunting and swearing and grabbing at each other with any purchase they can find, and Keith’s forgotten what it feels like to do this without the intent to kill, forgotten how good it is to just  _fight_. He’s so wrapped up in it that he doesn’t hear anything, doesn’t realize anything’s wrong until the entire cellar is suddenly flooded with light.

All of a sudden the room feels ten sizes too small. Keith freezes with one hands balled up in Lance’s shirt and the butt of Lance’s gun jammed up against his cheek, squints up at a blurry figure towering over them. He goes for his pistol, but the sound of a gun being cocked stops him cold. Beside him, Lance’s breath hitches.

“I wouldn’t,” the figure says.

Their voice is decidedly not Galran. It doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. His fingers stretch out.

Lance clamps a hand around his bicep. “Listen to the nice lady, Keith,” he says through gritted teeth.

“Keith,” the person above them says pleasantly. “You mind explaining what you’re doing in my basement?”

It take a moment for him to process that. And just as the words get through his head, his eyes adjust enough to see, standing above them, the Olkarian droid from the photographs.

She’s got the same markings, the same curly black hair. The toothy smile, however, is nowhere to be seen, along with nearly a quarter of the exterior paneling along the right side of her face. Keith can see rusted gears running up through her neck, errant lights blinking from buried circuit boards. She’s got a hunting rifle jammed up in her armpit, and it’s very obvious that the polite calm plastered on her face is insincere.

When neither of them answer, she adjusts her stance. Some of the joints in her legs whir audibly. “Or I can just go ask the Galrans crawling around my back yard what they think about all this.”

Keith and Lance share a glance. Lance nods nearly imperceptibly. His gaze is heavy, somber. Keith takes a bolstering breath before nodding back. They turn to face the woman.

“We aren’t telling you a goddamn thing,” Lance declares, at the same time that Keith says, “We have an Altean droid.”

Lance twists to Keith, the fiery outrage dampened somewhat by how much that tussle clearly took out of him. “What the hell! Keith!”

“You nodded!”

“It was an ‘Allura’s the priority’ nod—”

The woman starts. “Allura?”

“—and you nodded back!”

“What the hell does lying do?” Keith demands. “She’d eventually find her, and then she’d distrust us even more because we lied!”

Lance sneers. “Oh, so  _now_  you’re Miss Chatty Cathy.” The woman moves away, likely to go search the room, but Lance doesn’t seem to notice and Keith doesn’t feel like informing him. “It’s just me and Hunk and Pidge—”

“Stop saying everyone’s names.”

“—you know, the people who didn’t kill you despite every single warning sign suggesting otherwise and are now letting you tag along with for reasons  _absolutely_   _beyond me_ —you don’t share important information with.”

“I don’t owe any of you jack shit,” Keith says, and he almost means it, and Lance laughs, sharp and bright, in his face.

On the other side of the cellar, a gun clatters to the floor. Lance squeaks and then nearly brains Keith with his elbow.

“Holy fucking shit,” the woman says.

“I hate you,” Lance hisses at Keith.

“That’s  _Allura_.”

“That’s Allura,” Lance sighs, resigned.

Keith frowns at her tone. “Do you—know her?”

“Of course I do!” she says. “Everybody does! I mean, not personally, obviously, but…” She slows down, taking in their faces, and her expression clouds. “Do you…  _not_  know?”

“Um. What?”

“Altea. Alfor, and Melenor. Allura!”

“Lady,” Lance says, exchanging a glance with Keith, “we have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

She stares at them for a long moment, then spins away. “Fucking Galra,” she growls, and then lets loose a string of phrases that are clearly vulgar but Keith has absolutely no context for, and things start sliding into place.

“They erased Alteans from history,” he says. “That why we—that’s why there’s no information on them. And you know because you’re from… from before.”

“Before what?” Lance demands. “Before the war? I know a lot of people who were alive thirty years ago, and none of them know about this stuff.”

The droid snorts, passes a hand across her face. “Kid, I’ve been around a lot longer than thirty years.”

She kneels down beside Allura, which means she disappears from view. Keith surges up onto his feet. But when he rounds around the couch, he sees that she’s done nothing more than move some hair out of Allura’s face. She passes her hand over the wound but doesn’t touch it. She’s missing three fingers.

“She’s nearly dead,” she says to Keith.

“We’re aware.”

“She should be  _fully_  dead.”

“Well, she ain’t.”

She quirks an eyebrow at his tone. “And how’s that?”

Keith doesn’t answer. He realizes one of her eyes doesn’t track, just stays staring straight ahead, and some of the exposed parts along the side of her face have corroded well past the point of fixing. And then she frowns down at the wound.

“The hell,” she mutters. “Are those  _plants_  in there?”

Keith lowers himself on Allura’s other side. “They got stuck. I didn’t want to take ‘em out in case they jostled anything.”

“They aren’t just  _stuck_. They’re…  _adhered_  to her.”

“That’s impossible,” Keith says, and the droid laughs.

“I’d say the same thing,” she says, “if I wasn’t looking right at it. Look here.”

Lance scrambles up from somewhere behind him. “I wanna see, I wanna see.”

Keith leans forward. He doesn’t know droid hardware the way he knows other systems, isn’t quite sure what he’s looking at. But it isn’t hard to see that whatever happened isn’t normal. Wires and cogs have clearly shifted to fill in the void that the shot left behind, wedged themselves in amongst the tangle of roots and twigs, and some appear to have, impossibly enough, attached themselves to the plants.

The droid points to a few places. “These components aren’t in the right spot.”

Lance plops down next to Keith. “That sometimes happens when a photon beam goes through you.”

“They’ve  _moved,_ ” she says. “Of their own volition. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like they sensed the plants and sought them out.”

“But all this stuff is dead,” Keith says. He takes an errant vine between his fingers. “Or nearly is.”

“Yeah, nearly,” the droid replies softly. She frowns into the middle distance, and then, as her expression clears, the marks on her face begin to glow a deep earthy green. She smiles at him. For a second he sees the woman from the pictures. Keith’s heartbeat trips, forms a small bubble of hope in his chest despite himself. “You know what Olkarian droids were made to do?”

“Repair crops damaged by radiation,” he says through a suddenly dry throat.

“Not just crops,” she says. “And not just radiation.”

She sticks her hand into Allura’s chest.

Keith watches slack-jawed as the vines and roots and twigs begin to move—to  _wriggle_ —and then slowly come back to life, like a time-lapse video in reverse, licking around the droid’s fingers, filling in the voids until the hole has been plugged by a forest of greens and browns and golds, and even some small bursts of pink.

The vines stretch out towards the damaged parts, and instead of simply butting up against them the way he expected, they  _fuse to the metal_. They’re pulling at the snarls of broken machinery and the machinery is  _pulling back_ , shifting to accommodate and then merging together. Closing the circuits. Or maybe, more accurately: creating new ones.

And then, as the droid pulls her hand out, it all goes away, gets pulled beneath a smooth layer of wood that’s just a few shades darker than Allura’s skin. The boundary between the two isn’t sharp, or jagged. If Keith hadn’t just watched it get closed up, he doesn’t think he would’ve noticed at all. He wants to touch, make sure it’s really there, but the gesture suddenly feels invasive in a way it hadn’t been just moments before.

He peels his eyes away to check her marks and finds, with a flood of relief, that they’ve finally come back to full brightness. Something clenched tight in his chest loosens, something he hadn’t even been aware of until it’s gone and he can breathe again.

“I cannot believe that worked,” the droid says hoarsely.

“What did I just watch,” Lance whispers. “That was… that was like—”

“Magic?” She leans back, passes a hand over her mouth. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Lance looks fucking floored. His eyes drift up to Keith, and the soft wonder immediately turns into a scowl. “What are you smirking at?”

Keith ducks his head down, tries to tamp down on the giddy relief coursing through him.

“You guys should get going,” the droid says. “It won’t take long for the Galra to find this place. Come on, I’ll let you out the back.”

She pushes onto her feet and immediately cants sideways onto the couch. Keith and Lance both clamber up to help, but she shakes her head at them. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Oh, shit.” She stops shaking her head and blinks down at her hands braced against the cushions.

“You sure?” Lance asks. “I’d say you look pale, but…”

Keith has to agree. Droids don’t have blood and most aren’t programmed to replicate that sort of human physiology, but there is a gauntness, a tightness, to her face that hadn’t been there just moments before.

She lets out a breathy laugh. “Cohering organic and inorganic matter really takes it out of a droid, who knew. Oh, shit. Okay, yeah, if someone could—” She reaches out a hand, and before Keith can even take a step, Lance has already sprung forward to take it.

Keith is surprised—grudgingly impressed, even—as Lance wordlessly helps her upright and takes her to the far wall. It only lasts a moment, though, and then he realizes he’s been left with hoisting a limp Allura up off the floor and into his arms.

By the time he catches up with them, arms already screaming in protest, they’ve split up and are each standing in front of a picture frame.

“Keith and I tried this before,” Lance says. “But it didn’t work.”

“You need an Olkarian droid and a human. It doesn’t respond otherwise.”

She’s staring at her photograph—the one from the bar. Keith is glad that he can’t see her face.

“You should come with us,” he says, and they both snap their heads toward him. He isn’t sure who’s more surprised by the words: Lance, the droid, or himself.

“Yeah,” Lance says, slowly like he’s working it out as he speaks. “Yeah! Our digs aren’t like, the  _best_ , but they’re better than  _this_ —no offense—and you could help us figure out all this stuff about the Alteans—”

“Thanks,” she cuts in. “But no thanks.”

Lance’s mouth flaps a few times. “What?”

“My place is here.”

“What are you talking about?! There’s nothing here!”

“First off, this is my home, so fuck you,” she snaps, and for a moment she loses the hollow look in her eyes. “Second, your chances of getting out of here are already fucking slim. Toting me around too? It’s a death sentence.”

Keith knows she’s right, opens his mouth to say so. But the words get stuck.

Lance is white-lipped with rage. “So we’re just supposed to leave you here.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Except maybe don’t phrase it like you have a single fucking say in any of the decisions I make.  _And_ , this way, when the Galra come busting into my basement—which they almost certainly will, thanks to you to chuckleheads busting up the hatch—I can slow ‘em down. Buy you some time.”

“They’ll kill you!” Lance shouts.

“Yeah,” she shouts back. “That’s kind of the fucking point!”

It’s like the words open up a vacuum in the middle of the room and suck everything into it, because there is suddenly no air, no sound. Lance looks like he’s been slapped.

Keith sees the moment something inside of her gives. The laugh that falls out of her mouth is dull, lifeless. “Look at me,” she says. “I’m a walking corpse. Have been for a long time.”

“We can help you,” Lance says. There’s a thread of desperation in his voice that makes the hairs on Keith’s neck rise. “Hunk and Pidge, they can—”

“I’m almost two hundred years old.” She delivers the fact flatly, which only makes it all the more horrific. “My husband’s been dead upwards of a century. I go through the motions because I don’t know what else to do, short of walking into the lake and waiting for my systems to oversaturate. I’m done, all right? There’s nothing here for me now.”

Keith’s heart is in his throat. “There could be.”

She turns to him. To Allura in his arms. The razor shard look on her face softens. “This was more than I could’ve hoped for. Having made all these long years worth something. Making the last thing I do on this earth worth something, too. That’s more than most people get.”

So Keith says, “Okay,” and he hates himself for saying it, hates even more the relief that spreads across her face as he does so. But he’s the last person in the world to tell anybody else to live when they don’t want to.

“ _Okay?_ ” Lance repeats shrilly. He looks like he’s one second away from either punching someone or bursting into tears. Keith shifts Allura into one arm and comes forward, shoulders him out of the way. “No, it’s not  _okay_ , nothing about this is—what the hell are you—”

Keith presses his hand against the picture, covers up the smiling faces from a lifetime ago. He doesn’t look to see if the droid does the same, but a moment later a pulse of energy passes across his palm.

Suddenly there are seams in the wall that hadn’t been there a moment ago, and then an entire chunk of the wall soundlessly pulls away to reveal a gaping black opening. As they stand there, a series of overhead lights flicker to life and illuminate the passage. It stretches down at least fifty yards before curving out of sight. It smells like lake.

“Oh, wow,” Lance says softly.

“Yeah, it’s really something,” the droid says. “Get going.”

Keith steps in first, gets a face full of cool, wet air. Lance shuffles along a few seconds later. They both turn around to face her.

She’s dust-worn and creaking, pissy beyond belief, and Keith is struck suddenly by the miracle of her existence—two hundred years of memories and perspective, of knowledge, most of it now wiped away in the wake of the Galran Empire—and has to bite the inside of his mouth to keep from lunging forward and pulling her through.

“Thank you,” he says instead.

“Yeah.” Lance sounds like he’s dragging his words through gravel. “Thanks.”

“Watch out for bats,” she tells them, “the fuckers bite,” and then the door shuts in their faces.

For a moment, they just stand there. Keith isn’t sure if it’s the tunnel lighting or simply the constant stream of physical stress they’ve been subject to these past twelve hours, but Lance’s face has taken on a gray tone that’s more than a little worrying. Though he has to concede he isn’t feeling much better. His face is a riot of pain, his leg is barely holding his weight, and whatever weird energy pulse he gave Allura left him feeling more brittle than he’d care to admit. Like a bird bone.

They set off down the tunnel. They don’t speak a single word the entire time, even though Lance is clearly using every faculty available to him to keep from laying into Keith.

Keith finds himself a little disappointed. He wants to argue. To work through the angry snarl sitting high in his chest. To get it through Lance’s thick skull that his interest in droids’ wellbeing is consistently one-sided and incredibly self-serving.

He wants to, but he doesn’t; has to content himself with later. And  _that’s_  worrying, the fact that he’s thinking with any sort of confidence about a later stable enough to accommodate petty arguments with Lance.

Keith forcibly redirects his thoughts to safer territory, makes himself focus instead on their surroundings: the sound of water plinking into puddles, the cloying scent of bat guano. The way the light starts moving from pale yellow into something with a little more substance, and all the while the air on his face keeps getting crisper, fresher.

At the very end, where the overhead lamps are gone and everything is instead suffused in bright gray, the tunnel abruptly turns into a cave full of moss-laden rocks. Keith can see the lake through the opening, can see sunlight playing off its rippling waves.

They come to the end and nearly topple straight into the water. There’s no shoreline—just a slope that continues for about another foot before disappearing beneath the lake surface. They’re protected by the natural curves of the hill, nestled neatly between two extending ridges, but the added security is immaterial at this point; they won’t be truly safe until there are miles and miles between them and these mountains.

They retreat from the mouth of the cave, back into its shadows. Keith sits Allura against the wall, clamps down on a groan as his muscles release.

“What now?” Lance asks.

“Where were you supposed to meet with your contact?”

“Further north. Up at the tip of the lake.”

Keith leans back on the cool rock, closes his eyes. The lake is long and twisty, more like a river than anything else; it winds away to the north for quite a while, but there’s no flat land to traverse alongside, and any nearby Galra would automatically have the high ground.

Directly across from them is either an island or a peninsula jutting out into the lake’s center, Keith can’t tell from here. It wouldn’t be a far swim, but the whole stretch of hill is painfully open and exposed, and there’s no promise that Galra won’t be over there, too.

He opens his eyes. Lance looks just about as lost and bedraggled as he feels.

A great low rumbling begins somewhere outside.

“Oh, no,” Lance says. “Does that sound like what I think it sounds like?”

It sounds like a ship—a powerful one, too, and coming closer—but when Keith and Lance edge toward the opening to take a look, he doesn’t see anything. Not in the surrounding mountains, not in the sprawling lake. Nothing above but some wisps of cloud.

But then, just as Keith’s staring up, the sky— _ripples_. Like the particle barrier in Santa Maria. He wonders for one awful moment if they’ve somehow stumbled into an Empire-protected area, but then everything in view gets suddenly blotted out as a mid-sized fighter jet flickers into existence.

Keith is immediately struck by how  _wrong_  the craft looks. It’s awkwardly proportioned—bulbous in some places and too narrow in others—but, impossibly enough, still manages to communicate a certain amount of grace and potential for destruction. It reminds Keith of a wasp, or a scorpion.

An opening appears along the ship’s underbelly. From it descends a boarding ramp. Lance throws his arm out across Keith and whips his gun up, a gesture that is as nice as it is pointless. If the people on that ship wanted them dead, they’d be dead.

There’s a woman standing at the very end of the ramp. All her gear and weapons are just like the ship: wild and sleek and utterly alien. She looks completely at ease as she surveys them; bored, even.

Lance straightens suddenly. “Oh,” he says.

“Lance?” the woman calls out over the roaring engines. The plane settles a few feet over the lake surface, low enough now to kick up cold water, send Keith’s hair whipping across his face.

“Yeah!” Lance shouts back.

She nods, says something into what Keith can only assume is an earpiece, and then the ramp extends towards them. Keith’s first impulse is to skitter away, find some cover, but Lance has transformed suddenly, is practically vibrating with energy.

He grins at Keith. “This is our ride!”

The moment the ramp butts up against the rocky ledge, the woman steps off. She’s sharp-faced, with roughly cropped hair and a hawkish gaze. She’s Galran, Keith realizes with a sick jolt, but right on the tail-end of that realization comes a second one: she isn’t completely Galran. Or, perhaps more accurately: she isn’t  _just_  Galran—somehow less and more at the same time.

The third realization nearly takes him out at the knees: he knows that feeling intimately.

“Pidge and Hunk,” Lance begins breathlessly.

“They’re on board.” Lance sags against the wall. “The Altean?”

Heart pounding out a furious tempo, Keith steps aside to let her see.

She barely spares Keith a glance before striding forward and kneeling down in front of Allura. Her hands are careful as they run through a quick diagnostic check, and then she murmurs something into her earpiece too low for Keith to catch.

She scoops Allura up into her arms. Keith wants to protest, but he had been genuinely despairing over the prospect of picking her back up only a minute ago, so.

“Let’s go,” she says. She looks at Keith again but this time, she holds his gaze. This time, there’s an assessing glint in her gold-ringed eyes. “Prince Lotor is very anxious to speak with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, the lake in this chapter exists and people have uploaded panoramic photos from their boats to google maps, and technology is really beautiful sometimes.
> 
> Re: revisions - Basically Haxus' questions about Keith being human and about his parents are now framed as kind of redundant and frustrating, because there are no human/droid hybrids, and Keith looks human, ergo he _has to_ be human. Keith knows Haxus is just trying to get Keith emotional and defensive with the line of questions, but he is also a little freaked because the questions are hitting very close to home. I state very explicitly that the Empire doesn't know human/droid hybrids are possible. Also, unrelated but new, Haxus mentioned that Keith's dad is dead, which caught Keith off guard, as he didn't know.
> 
> And then I also changed like a tiny little line in Chapter 3, when Keith is trying to figure out how Hunk knows so much about engineering stuff. I originally had a throwaway line about Keith wondering if Hunk was somehow a Galran hybrid. I basically just stuck in a "even though that's silly and impossible" at the end haha.
> 
> Re: sexual assault - While fighting, Keith is put in a position that triggers a flashback to his time in a Galran holding cell (following his and Shiro's capture but before their participation in the gladiator contests). He's overpowered by a Galran soldier who voices his frustration that the war will be wrapped up soon now that Shiro can be used as ransom. He doesn't see it as a fair resolution after the decades of abuse droids suffered at the hands of humans. He makes Keith think he's about to rape him but then doesn't, "proving" that droids are more humane than humans.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I have a habit of saving scrapped stuff just in case I ever want to use bits and pieces later. I did a word count and I literally have almost 30,000 trashed words from this chapter. Some of that is like repeats and re-hashes of the same general scene but I guess my point is I had a really hard time with this gd chapter. If the several months of radio silence were any indication (very sorry about that).

Pidge and Hunk turn out to be on board Lotor’s ship, which is hidden somewhere in the far reaches of the Sierra Nevadas. So they fly northeast for a while—Lance and Keith and Allura, and their taciturn pilot.

They cut across the same barren basin Keith had crossed on his way back from the Mojave Power Plant, except this far north it’s three times as wide and ten times as verdant. They pass into the mountains—coated first in dark pine, then gray rock, eventually snow. Somewhere on the far side of these ragged peaks lies Lotor’s ship. Keith can see its location blinking on the dashboard map.

The ride is tense. Their quarters are tight—just enough room to get crammed into the storage space between pilot seat and back wall, nowhere near enough to have a private conversation—and Keith doesn’t want this soldier knowing how cornered he feels right now.

 _We had an inside guy_ , he had told Pidge.

 _Oh_ , she had said back. _So do we._

Betrayal tastes bitter in the back of Keith’s throat. Betrayal, and whatever emotion it is that’s making his chest tight as his thoughts start to spin out. He doesn’t want to follow their paths of descent, doesn’t want to examine the wreckage of their landing. But at this point it’s a matter of doing so now or later, and seeing as “later” has just become a great gaping void of who the fuck knows, he braces himself and wades in.

He starts with the obvious new fact: Pidge and Hunk and Lance’s inside guy is Prince Lotor, former heir to the Galran Empire.

Keith shoves aside the weakness that the name conjures up. He doesn’t have time for it. And, on a distant level, he recognizes that the fizzy dread attempting to surface is not so much a real-time response as it is a remnant from a time long past. Which makes sense: that sort of childish, animal fear had been the first thing burned out of him during the war.

He goes through his time with them—starting on that first day of Hunk trailing behind him like a lost puppy—and re-lays the tracks now that he knows they’d had Lotor’s backing the entire time. Everything settles out a little differently, and it doesn’t take long at all for alarm and shame and hurt to twist up his gut, triplet coils braiding together tight enough to choke.

It’s harder to detangle this mass of emotions, harder yet to push the extraneous ones aside. He had thought the crew was part of some half-baked human resistance effort. He had thought they needed all the help they could get. He had thought he was providing it. He had been wrong on all accounts.

So Keith has to reconsider why Pidge didn’t cast him out into last night’s storm. Up until now he had assumed it was because he hadn’t told her everything yet—hadn’t explained the last mission at all—and she didn’t seem the type to leave stones unturned, especially if those stones had to do with infiltrating Galran systems.

But that’s all fucking inconsequential now. Because Lotor has avenues to utilize—strings to pull and people to call on—that Keith couldn’t equal in his wildest dreams. And if the strange fighter jet and stern soldier are any indication, Lotor clearly hadn’t spent his time in exile sitting around moping.

Keith remembers suddenly the gladiator radio channel, the last time he had heard Lotor’s name. The commentators had mentioned the exiled prince’s plans for entering a champion to challenge the Black Lion. Not a very subtle reinsertion into society, but a respectable one by Galran standards. If that was the opening move of whatever master strategy Lotor has cooked up, it’s already leagues beyond the toothpick plan Matt, Shiro, and Keith had scrapped together.

So, no, Keith is no use to them on a functional level. He couldn’t fly a shitty cargo ship for five minutes without having a complete mental breakdown, and he had completely disregarded Lance’s warning about killing Galran soldiers, too caught up in his own head to listen. He can see now, in the harsh light of hindsight, how much of a liability he really is.

Is Pidge keeping him around for sentimental reasons? Some misplaced sense of loyalty? Or is it just plain dumb kindness? All possible, but also painfully naïve, and contingent on too many moving parts—most of which Keith has no way of even beginning to wrangle. A lot of lessons had been pounded into Keith over the years, but none one quite as firmly as this: never assume the best of anyone.

The most logical explanation for his presence is as obvious as it is devastating, and it is this: Pidge found evidence of Keith’s android makeup while removing his chip, and she realized he was too valuable to let wander off. Not that she’d had to try hard to keep him close; he had lapped up their acceptance like a starving dog.

Or maybe she just wants revenge for her dead brother. Maybe all those nice things she’d said to him the other night had been a lie. During the early years of the war, Lotor had been infamous for his propensity for torture, and Keith can’t think of a more fitting punishment for his sins than one of his most vivid childhood nightmares finally becoming a reality.

He doesn’t remember this, but at some point upon his return to Earth, Keith had learned that every single Garrison leader—Matt’s parents included—had been summarily executed, and he’d left it at that. Hadn’t, to his knowledge, even remembered there was a little sister who might have survived—who might have been out there somewhere, scared and alone and burning from the inside out.

“Quit it,” Lance snaps.

Keith blinks away the image of blood and static to find Lance scowling at him. Dark bruises have pooled beneath his eyes from the busted nose, and he’s got a hand wedged against his stained dressing. Keith realizes, as he looks down, that he’s crowded into Lance’s space, that every single one of his muscles has locked up tight.

He relaxes away with some effort. “Sorry.”

The word comes out way too slow. He wonders if he’s having a panic attack. He thinks maybe he is. He can’t tell. His body feels far away. There are tremors running through it, but they could just as easily be the ship’s doing as his own. The world is not reduced to a narrow point the way he’s come to know and expect; instead, it is blown wide and over-sharp. Like he’s firing on cylinders he didn’t even know he had.

Lance opens his mouth, snarky response at the ready, but then he pauses. Keith realizes Lance’s eyes are dark blue. Flat. Like the ocean on an overcast day. Erock’s office was too high up to feel the sway of water, but if Keith pressed his ear to the wall he thought he could maybe hear waves crashing against the Antioch’s hull. He wonders if Erock is okay. If he got in any trouble on Keith’s account.

With that thought, any lingering outrage and hurt bleeds right out of him. Keith used Erock for years—even worse because it was for nothing more than the temporary sating of a pathetic vice. Pidge’s crew is attempting to overthrow an empire that spans planets. Of course there will be collateral.

Lance closes his mouth at whatever expression is on Keith’s face, then turns away.

The rest of the ride is spent in silence.

 

* * *

 

The moment the fighter jet docks against Lotor’s ship and the doors sweep open, there is a hand around Keith’s throat. He thrashes automatically, but the grip is iron tight, so he doesn’t do much more than gape at the face of a snarling half-Galran as he’s lifted up and slammed into the wall. All the air in his lungs whooshes out in one great punch.

Lance yelps from where he’d been knocked onto the floor. He scrabbles up and throws himself forward, but the pilot reaches over the back of her seat and grabs ahold of him. Behind them, Keith catches the briefest flash of a pair of heads, one gingery and the other dark, before he’s slammed against the wall a second time.

“What have you done to her?” The words come out low, guttural, strangely inflected. The fingers on Keith’s neck dig in, deep enough now to do actual damage. Keith tries kicking out, but the droid immediately knocks the attempt away. “What have you done to Allura?”

“You psycho, we haven’t done anything!” Lance screams. He flails against the arms keeping him back. “She’d be fucking dead if it wasn’t for him!”

The droid’s lip pulls back into a sneer, but he doesn’t let go. Keith feels tears prick the corners of his eyes. He’s been stuck at the bottom of an inhale for what feels like an eternity.

Another droid appears—more or less melts into view. It’s another half-Galran, dressed in the same strange black and blue and orange as the others, but this one has no eyes or nose. Just a single metal sheet where an upper face should be, and a mouth that has been clumsily—or carelessly—welded shut. A scream builds in Keith’s throat.

“Hey, come on,” he hears Lance say. “We don’t need to—”

“No,” the droid says. “Narti.”

Narti reaches forward and places their palm against Keith’s forehead. The inorganic touch triggers a flash of memory: a cold palm cupping his cheek, strong fingers sweeping along his hairline, violet eyes bleeding into gold—

And then there’s a presence. In his mind. It presses against the edges of his thoughts—a storm rattling the windowpanes. Keith thinks, _oh_ , and then slams everything down. First around the memory of his mother, and then everything else. He does it so fast and hard that Narti jerks their hand away like they’ve been burned.

The two droids exchange a glance, and then Keith is released. The only reason he doesn’t fall is because the droid immediately crowds up against him and then presses the tip of a long and wicked dagger to his ribcage. Keith sucks in a heaving breath anyway, so desperate for it he barely feels the burn along his throat or the pinch against his side.

“My, my, you are full of surprises,” the droid snarls. “Answer me, or I puncture your lung. Do you understand?”

Keith tries to make room for himself, but there’s none. He’s being smothered against this cold and unforgiving body. He makes fists, digs his fingernails in. Clings desperately to this moment. This moment, and no other. He nods.

“What is your name?”

“Keith Kogane.” The words are rough and broken. Barely human.

“What color is my hair?”

For a moment, Keith just stares. And then it falls into place. He checks around for any sort of biometric monitor but can’t find anything. The droid lets out a growl. Keith grunts as the dagger digs deeper into his side.

“Keith.” Pidge and Hunk have fought their way into the jet, but more half-Galran soldiers have barred them from getting too close. Keith wonders, first with a manic sort of humor and then blood-chilling horror, if Lotor is collecting half-Galrans. Pidge’s eyes are wide in a deathly pale face. “Answer him.”

Keith looks back at the droid and licks his lips, tastes stale blood. “White.”

“Are you working for Emperor Zarkon?”

This gives Keith pause. It isn’t the question he was expecting. A flutter of hope rears its head. He tries not to give it any space to grow. “No.”

“Are you working for Empress Honerva?”

“No.”

“Have you worked for either of them in the past?”

“I’m—I’m not a Galran spy. I already told—”

“I am aware of what you’ve already told,” the droid snaps. He gives Keith a teeth-rattling shake. “ _Answer the question._ Have you worked for Zarkon or Honerva in the past?”

“No.”

“Are you working for parties that wish anybody on this ship harm?”

“No.”

“Was your joining this group premeditated in any way?”

Keith coughs out a laugh. “No.”

All at once, the weight on his chest disappears. He drops to the floor and then watches in something of a daze as the droid goes to one knee beside Allura. A commotion starts up as Pidge and Hunk are released and immediately begin scrabbling their way in, but the flurry of excitement fades into the background as Keith watches the droid extend one long finger to brush aside the ragged rip in Allura’s coveralls.

Keith’s skin crawls watching the hand that had just nearly crushed the life out of him draw so close to her, but the droid moves with nothing but the utmost care. Something niggles at the back of Keith’s brain. Before he can chase it down, he’s jostled as a pair of arms wraps around him.

“Oh my god,” Hunk warbles wetly into his neck, “I’m so glad you guys are okay.”

“Hunk, good lord,” Pidge mutters, and then bodily hauls him off. She gives Keith a once-over. Her eyes narrow at whatever marks have been left on his neck, and she cuts a glare at the droid. “I _told_ you Keith was safe.”

With the immediate danger neutralized for the moment, Keith finally processes the fact that nobody is making any indication that he’s been brought here for any reason other than Pidge and Hunk’s (and, Keith supposes, to some minor degree Lance’s as well) goodwill. It’s hard to feel like he isn’t being purposefully obtuse, but surely he’d already be strapped to an examination table if Lotor had any idea who had just walked onto his ship.

It’s not as happy a realization as he expected. He doesn’t know how he keeps finding stupid idiots who waste their time on him. If he isn’t careful, he’s going to get these ones killed too.

The droid doesn’t pull his gaze from Allura. “You’ll forgive me for not placing all my faith in the approval of a teenager.”

Pidge gapes in affront. “I’m twenty-one!”

“Sixteen, twenty-one. Do you realize how insignificant that difference is to someone as old as I am?”

“Relativity has nothing to do with it! The brain chemistries between a teenager and a twenty-one-year-old are vastly different, most notably in the frontal lobe—”

“You’re Lotor,” Keith says, just to make sure he’s not going crazy, that Pidge really is shooting the shit with the man who flayed human captives open to see how long they could survive with their own hearts clutched in their hands. Who dissected people’s eyeballs while they were still awake. Who strapped his own subordinates down when they killed Garrison soldiers instead of bringing them back alive.

“I am,” Lotor says after a moment, and Keith is surprised to find the confirmation less terrifying than he expected. What really hits Keith in the gut is the fact that Lotor is half Altean. “And you are Keith Reese.”

Keith just barely manages to smother his flinch. “Not anymore.”

Lotor smiles. “Oh, I think there’s still a bit of that soldier somewhere in there. And I think he’s got quite a story to tell.”

“If you think I’m telling you a fucking thing—”

“There’s no need for the antagonism. We’re on the same side now, you and I.”

 _“Antagonism?”_ The word rips up Keith’s throat, startles Hunk. “You strangled me half to death!”

“I had more than enough reason to suspect you of subterfuge. Greatest of all being the fact that you were able to resist a Galran interrogation method that, as far as I’m aware, was never discovered by Garrison intelligence.”

“He did what now?” Lance squawks.

Interrogation method. An excessively mild term. It makes Keith’s blood boil. “Well, it got discovered.”

“How?” Lotor presses. “Take care with your answer. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

Keith clamps his mouth shut. He’s prepared to sit here until Lotor either gives up or kills him. He would’ve sat there all night if it meant pissing Lotor off. But there’s more than just one pair of expectant eyes on him; it’s not just Lotor’s trust that’s on the line.

Keith’s shoulders sag. He takes a deep breath, forcibly calms himself down. “Matthew Holt developed a program that could infiltrate Galran broadband systems.”

There’s a long pause. When Keith dares to look over, it’s to find Lotor staring into the middle distance. “That,” he eventually says, attention falling back on Keith like an anvil, “was a lie.”

Keith’s blood runs cold. He looks around again for a scanner. Maybe Lotor’s bluffing.

Lotor’s smile spreads into something sharper. “Don’t look so shocked. You’ve taught your body to ignore several important physiological impulses, but certainly not all of them. And unlike the factory-grade draff your government foists on its subjects, my program has evolved over the years.” Lotor stops and gives Keith an assessing look. He doesn’t seem upset that Keith lied; if anything, he looks thoughtful—calculating.

“Torture won’t work either,” Keith rasps.

“Nobody’s torturing you, Keith,” Pidge says. “Jesus.”

The affront in her tone sets Keith’s teeth on edge: she of all people should know what Lotor is capable of. But then again, she agreed to work with him. So she either doesn’t know or doesn’t care, and Keith doesn’t know what’s worse.

“It’s all right,” Lotor assures Pidge. He rises smoothly to his feet, surveys them all with the most carefully pleasant expression Keith has ever seen in his life. “Do you know where your rooms are?”

“Yeah, we’re good,” Pidge says. “Hunk and I were taken to them.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Keith demands. “Am I going crazy, or is this not the guy who used to torture Garrison soldiers for fun?”

At the words, something in Lotor’s expression cuts out—like a power cord ripped from its socket. Keith is left staring up into a flat and vacant mask. He hadn’t realized how unassuming Lotor had looked until he’s suddenly anything but. He’s reminded of the Black Lion in his dreams, every aspect inevitable and unstoppable. A trill of alarm jolts through him.

“Mind yourself,” snaps the pilot. Keith is surprised to find genuine anger simmering beneath her carefully-held control. “You have no idea—”

“Acxa,” Lotor says. “Enough.”

“But _sir_ —”

“I said _enough!”_

The word makes the jet rattle like it’s made of aluminum. Everybody freezes. This, finally, Keith sees, is the man who haunted his dreams for years. Who cast a pall over the Garrison so heavy it never fully lifted. Pulled to his towering height, his face a cold mask. He turns the full weight of his anger on Pidge.

“Get your stray out of my sight,” he growls. “Right now.”

“Hunk,” Pidge says weakly.

“No,” Keith says. “Pidge—”

Hunk spins around, grabs Keith beneath his armpits, and hauls him upright. Keith thrashes against Hunk’s grip, but the sudden shift floods his vision with crackling black. One moment he’s fighting and the next he’s clinging white-knuckled to Hunk’s shirt. The dizziness presses into his temples, leaves his mouth full of burning metal. By the time it clears away, they’re already off of the jet and onto the main ship, marching down a long, endless hallway.

Keith twists around in Hunk’s grip, heart in his throat. He catches the briefest flash of Lotor’s head bowed over Allura’s, their bone-white hair mixing together, and then Hunk tugs him around a corner and out of sight.


End file.
